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Paper short abstract

Climate change is often viewed as an urgent crisis, yet its impacts usually do not prompt action in urban life. This paper explores why heat is a non-concern for different socio-economic groups and shows how its management and experience reveal deep inequalities in care and non-care.

Paper long abstract

Climate change is often characterized as an urgent crisis; however, its manifestations in everyday urban life frequently fail to mobilize immediate action among different societal groups. This paper seeks to scrutinize the apparent lack of urgency concerning heat despite its intensifying nature and well-documented health risks.

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in Klagenfurt/Austria, the paper examines the social production of non-care, highlighting how it is influenced by unequal material conditions, diverse emotional responses, and competing urgencies. For economically privileged actors, the management of heat is facilitated through financial means such as air-conditioned homes, secondary residences, mobility, and leisure infrastructures, thereby allowing climate change to be perceived as a controllable or even pleasurable phenomenon. In stark contrast, economically marginalized actors frequently regard heat as an unavoidable and normalized facet of their lived experience, one that necessitates endurance rather than proactive engagement. For them, heat is subordinated to pressing obligations related to caregiving, precarious working and living situations, and pervasive physical and mental health challenges.

The case of heat in Klagenfurt shows that urgency itself is socially uneven and cannot be assumed as a shared condition. What appears as climate indifference is better understood as an effect of unequal temporal, material, and affective capacities to care. By foregrounding non-care as a relational practice, the paper challenges universalizing notions of urgency in climate debates and calls for a more situated understanding of climate action, and one that does not merely operate within existing inequalities but actively seeks to address and reduce them.