Presentation short abstract

The presentation discusses what ethnography can add to wildfire vulnerability assessments in Barcelona’s WUI, highlighting everyday infrastructures, care relations and governance dynamics often absent from social indicators, reframing wildfire risk as an urban political-ecology issue.

Presentation long abstract

In recent years, wildfire risk assessments in Mediterranean Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) areas have increasingly incorporated social vulnerability indicators. These efforts rely largely on census-based models that aggregate variables such as age, income or household composition to map and compare vulnerability at scale. While useful for policy prioritisation, such models often fail to capture how vulnerability is lived, negotiated and mitigated in everyday life, and how infrastructural, relational and political factors shape residents’ capacity to act.

This presentation examines what ethnographic research can reveal about social vulnerability that standard indexes routinely overlook. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork in two mountain neighbourhoods of Barcelona, we identify several critical yet underrepresented dimensions: mobility constraints linked to single-access roads, ageing and care dependencies, weak institutional trust, long-standing infrastructural neglect, and uneven forms of social cohesion, among others. Above all, our findings show how everyday practices, social and material infrastructures and relations of trust shape both vulnerability and adaptive capacity.

In this regard, a situated ethnographic perspective highlights how wildfire risk is produced through specific histories of urbanisation, governance arrangements and socioecological relations characteristic of Mediterranean WUI contexts. This reframes wildfires in Barcelona as an urban political ecology issue in which risks are unevenly distributed, responsibilities are negotiated, and important local capacities remain poorly recognised within institutional models.

By foregrounding these dynamics, the presentation contributes to broader debates on how social sciences can illuminate the limits of institutional risk governance and foster more just, relational and sustainable forms of preparedness and adaptation.