Exposure to the urban climate: Attunement, weathering, and atmospheric care

Drawing on a focus-group based qualitative study of everyday sense-making practices, we examine how Rotterdam citizens attune themselves – or not – to multiple realities of climate change within their city. We conceptualize three vectors of attunement, suggesting that people attune themselves to climate change through 1. the body, 2. material arrangements, and 3. sentinel species in the city. Secondly, we analyze the ways in which people live with and act on their both voluntary and involuntary intimacies with climate change and related processes, drawing attention in particular to tactics of weathering and atmospheric care. Taken together, our discussion hence conceptualizes the ways in which urban citizens sensitize themselves to rapidly heating cities mediated by their bodies’ vulnerabilities and (spatial/atmospheric) porousness. Exposure here emerges as a series of patterned, uneven, sensations, distributed over and mediated by humans and more-than-human urban elements, that people become responsive to by means of local and lived tactics of weathering and atmospheric care.