Sensing and making sense of cities as wave fields
A multimodal guided bus tour through “hot spots” in Madrid
WAVEMATTERS, 2022
On the 8th of July 2022, more than 50 STS scholars attending the EASST conference in Madrid participated in a three-hour “thermodynamic” bus ride organised by the WAVEMATTERS team to selected “hot-spots” and heat infrastructures in Madrid. In our experimental journey, we visited three thought-provoking sites – the Bosque Metropolitano, the Eco-Bulevar, and the Escaravox – that stand for different types of urban heat infrastructures. At these places, we sensed heat with our bodies in perceptual walks, while in smaller groups, we reflected on our heat experiences, sensations, and strategies. And finally, aiming to make sense of heat, of bodily exposure to heat, and of cooling infrastructures, we gathered under some trees in a park next to Matadero, our last stop, for a closing round of discussion and reflection. In groups, we reflected on the visited sites with two questions in mind: What kind of practices and users do these sites invite or exclude? How do these sites infrastructure futures and which futures are those? We learned how each of the three sites is embedded in local urban textures, reflected upon the gaps between the visions and aims of planners and designers and the actual modes of appropriation, as well as on how heat is imagined in each of these sites, and on which heat futures, or future heat practices, are enacted in each of these interventions.