Changing patterns of heat and daylight in urban environments are creating growing inequalities, with climate-related shifts reshaping daily life and disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities.
Researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA) have examined how elemental conditions such as rising temperatures and changing daylight experiences influence the way people live, move and interact within cities - using London and Delhi as examples.
They argue that urban planning and climate adaptation strategies must look beyond infrastructure and technical solutions to consider the lived experiences of residents.
By focusing on bodily and temporal perspectives - how people physically experience heat and how changing environmental conditions affect daily routines and rhythms - the researchers highlight the unequal impacts of climate change across different social groups.
Factors such as housing quality, access to green spaces, work patterns and neighbourhood design can significantly shape people's exposure and ability to cope with extreme conditions.
Climate change not experienced equally in cities
Writing in the journal Urban Studies, they suggest that climate-related inequalities are becoming increasingly embedded within urban environments, raising important questions about fairness, public health and access to comfortable, safe public spaces.
"Climate change is not experienced equally," said Dr Casper Ebbensgaard , a Lecturer in Human Geography at UEA's School of Environmental Sciences . "Understanding how heat and daylight are felt in everyday life is essential for developing more inclusive and equitable cities."
Dr Kavita Ramakrishnan , from UEA's School of Global Development , added: "The examples we present demonstrate how heat and daylight are encountered in the face of changing climate realities and top-down planning and housing development.
"As cities worldwide confront the growing impacts of climate change, this analysis provides new insights into the importance of placing human experience at the centre of urban planning and resilience strategies."
The researchers say there is a need to reframe understandings of weather extremes through the bodies that experience them, and call for urban planners, policymakers and community leaders to integrate social justice considerations into climate adaptation efforts.
This includes designing cities that better protect residents from extreme heat, improve access to cooling spaces and recognise the diverse ways people experience environmental change throughout the day and across seasons.
Thermal justice
Thermal conditions like heatwaves reveal disparities in urban vulnerability and the limitations of scientific measurements. For example, Delhi experienced temperatures of 49.9°C in
May/June 2024, while an even higher recorded temperature of 52.9 °C was later attributed to either a fault or 'local factors'.
The lack of shade in the city exposes outdoor workers, street vendors, and informal labourers to health issues such as fatigue, dehydration, heatstroke, and even death.
Temperature readings often externalize bodily sensations, ignoring individual sensitivities influenced by class, gender, and caste, while infrastructure failures such as electricity shortages worsen thermal exposure, especially in informal housing.
During the heatwave in Delhi in May this year, power cuts prevented residents from turning on fans and cooling appliances, leaving indoor temperatures dangerously high, and preventing people from getting adequate rest.
Daylight justice
Access to daylight significantly affects health, mood, and circadian rhythms, with urban design playing a critical role. While excessive sunlight in Delhi causes health issues, in London excessive shade and a lack of daylight caused by new, high-rise developments threaten the health of residents, impacting sleep and emotional wellbeing.
Social housing residents and marginalized populations find themselves disproportionally exposed to the harms of substandard daylight conditions, with some reporting that they have lost the ability to see the sky from anywhere in their flats. This can affect their ability to sense changes in weather and natural light throughout the day, the primary cue for our internal biological clocks in regulating sleep, hormones and energy.
The authors highlight how residential and campaign groups have succeeded in some cases in forcing local authorities and developers to acknowledge the effects of daylight and sunlight deprivation in the planning process, and how the numerical changes – in terms of the number of new homes and stories over which they are built - would translate into a deterioration of the lives of affected residents.
"Recognising daylight as a human right and linking it to mental health and disease resistance, as it has been in the UK, has strengthened advocacy," said Dr Ebbensgaard.
"By speaking about the impact that it would have, especially for vulnerable residents, the campaigners shifted the terms of the debate away from numbers alone to consider how daylight constitutes a fundamental part of creating healthy living environments for all residents, regardless of tenure."
The state of urban infrastructure also affects how people experience issues such as water shortages, extreme heat and rainfall, or pollution. While scientific data can help track these problems, the authors say it does not always capture their real effects on people's health and daily lives, particularly for disadvantaged communities.
'Shifting elemental bodies in the city: towards thermal and daylight justice', Kavita Ramakrishnan and Casper Ebbensgaard, is published in Urban Studies.
