This year, I want to build a research line around a single, thick atmosphere: bochorno. Not “heat” as a number, not “summer” as a season, not “climate” as an abstraction—but bochorno as a lived condition: the sticky, pressing presence that settles on skin and breath, that changes your pace, your mood, and your willingness to stay outside. Bochorno is the sun when it stops being background and becomes a daily force—something you negotiate, manage, and learn to live with.
Taking bochorno seriously means treating it as more than a sensation. It is a spatial organizer. It redraws the city in real time: you begin to move by shade, stitching together protected patches like a practical choreography. You learn to time errands and encounters around moments of tolerable exposure. You notice thresholds—how a single step from shadow into full sun can feel like switching worlds, from viability to overload. And you start to see how seemingly minor elements—awnings, arcades, trees, building edges, fountains, libraries, doorways—become decisive infrastructures for everyday life.
This focus pulls me toward the politics of shade. Shade is not simply the absence of sun; it is a form of urban relief that enables movement, waiting, street economies, and simple presence outdoors. But shade is also uneven and contested. It is distributed differently across streets and neighborhoods, appearing and disappearing depending on the hour, and is sustained through material work, including installing, repairing, cleaning, watering, and maintaining. It is also shaped by rules and permissions: who can place an awning, who can occupy a sheltered edge, which spaces are recognized as refuges, and whose comfort is treated as a public concern. Following shade, you begin to glimpse how habitability is produced—and how easily it can be withheld.
What makes this line of inquiry especially compelling is that the sun carries two faces at once. On the one hand, it is hazard: something that forces avoidance, protection, and constant recalibration. On the other hand, it is increasingly framed as asset: a resource to be captured, valued, and transformed into promises of “clean” futures. That double condition matters because it ties together bodies and contracts, comfort and land, exposure and valuation. The sun is not only weather; it is also economy and morality—a medium through which futures are proposed, justified, and disputed.
Methodologically, I want to stay close to everyday mechanisms rather than start from big categories. That means paying attention to how relief is actually made usable: the micro-cartographies of shade (where it lands, when, and for whom), the sensory thresholds that shape decisions, the improvised tactics people invent to keep moving, and the maintenance work that quietly holds small refuges in place. Bochorno becomes my orienting thread: not a theme to illustrate, but a way to decide what counts as relevant—what signals a limit, what creates a pause, what makes a route possible.
Ultimately, I’m after a vocabulary—and a set of grounded descriptions—that treat bochorno as a serious condition of urban life. I want to learn from the city’s minor solutions and frictions: the timed routes, the informal refuges, the shadow lines that become social territory, the disputes over who gets to linger where. Because bochorno is not only something we endure. It is something that teaches—about bodies and thresholds, about uneven protection, and about what kinds of life a city makes possible under intensifying heat.
That is my spine for this year: to study the sun through the everyday politics of shade, with bochorno as the core atmosphere of inquiry.