Alexandros-Vasileios Mademochoritis – The Sociotechnical Materiality of Heat

Researchers in urban climate studies argue that urban climate action centers on carbon accounting and climate-resilient infrastructure. As a result, the day-to-day processes by which the urban fabric adapts to increasing heat often remain out of sight. This thesis addresses this blind spot by asking: How do the infrastructures that keep people cool actually come into being—by whom, and according to what logic? Using Paris as a case study, it traces the day-to-day decisions, frictions, and mechanisms that bring urban adaptation to heat to life. The study contrasts “what is said” with “what is done” by combining a careful review of municipal documents (climate action plans, resilience strategies, annual reports, local urban planning documents, and technical documents) with 52 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2025. Rather than treating “heat” as an environmental constant, the analysis traces its socio-technical production through three overlapping modes of action: (1) public space transformation projects, (2) building renovations, and (3) social and crisis protocols. Three key findings emerge. First, fragmentation is inherent in the very nature of the subject matter: asset ownership categories (existing/new and municipal/social/private) divide a single building, square, or street into different regulatory and funding frameworks, forcing stakeholders to “piece together” renovation solutions on a project-by-project basis. Second, expertise is largely derived from practical experience. Most professionals acknowledge that they never studied heating in college; however, pilot projects, proprietary software, experiments, and manuals drawn from gray literature have become de facto training programs, incorporating commercial and bureaucratic priorities into what is considered adaptive knowledge. Third, equity tensions are most clearly evident in building renovations and access to the cooling network. The Parisian cooling network is connected only to commercial buildings; thermal regulations are underdeveloped; the burden and cost of thermal renovations are shifted to public housing providers, while public subsidies remain insufficient for private landlords. This dissertation makes two major contributions to research on climate-responsive urban planning. Empirically, it presents the first detailed mapping of a heat adaptation ecosystem at the city scale, detailing how trees, green roofs, chilled water pipelines, shutters, and emerging emergency care protocols interact and readjust across property categories, financing arrangements, pilot projects, and land-use negotiations. Conceptually, it expands the scope of climate urbanism by demonstrating that adaptation cannot be understood solely as infrastructure protection and carbon management, but also as the contested reorganization of everyday thermal life. In Paris, cooling infrastructure emerges through negotiations surrounding property, financing, expertise, and heritage, resulting in unequal access to comfort throughout the city. To capture this dynamic, the dissertation introduces the concept of the political ecology of thermal comfort: comfort is not a universal or technical state, but a socio-ecological outcome shaped by material and institutional struggles over who stays cool, how, and at what cost. This framework responds to recent calls in climate urbanism research to examine the everyday practices of climate governance. It demonstrates that heat adaptation does not unfold as a mere technical addition to climate plans, but as a process that reorganizes the urban environment and urban life in unequal ways. Recognizing heat adaptation as a political ecology of comfort thus helps clarify the materiality of climate urban planning as the lived interaction between people, artifacts, and spaces.