This year, I am focused on creating a research line within heat studies on the politics of urban (in)habitability, developed through sustained ethnographic fieldwork on heat, shade, and thermal inequality in Murcia, Spain. Where much of the existing literature treats habitability as a threshold eventually crossed, my work argues that (in)habitability is better understood as a condition continuously produced and unevenly distributed across the city rather than a line that is crossed once. In Murcia’s peripheral neighborhoods, built over the historic huerta without replacing its hydraulic and thermal logic, infrastructure meant to signal thermal governance, irrigation channels repurposed as ornament, young trees planted without maintenance budgets, bus shelters with no functional shade, persists as what I call ghost infrastructure and thermal simulacrum: it looks like care while delivering none. I name this condition thermal abandonment, and I read it as governing absence made visible at the scale of the neighborhood: not the absence of institutions but their presence in the specific position of not acting, sanctioning the endurance of residents who have no infrastructural alternative. Habitability, on this account, is not a binary that mortality counts alone can measure; it is a graded, locatable, and politically produced condition that only becomes fully legible through sustained presence in the places where its absence is lived daily.
