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This study will be based on data collected through interviews, analysis of archival and policy* documents, participant observation and experimental/action based research. **Interviews** with a variety of stakeholders (see stakeholders) provide an entry point for understanding how heat is problematized in different regulatory and governmental regimes – both within and outside governmental regulatory bodies (e.g. also urban/regional planning, parks & rec., climate & earth science, architecture and spatial design, public health, emergency planning). **Archival and policy document analysis** aims at further the understanding of how heat is not only problematized but also accounted for and planned against across the different domains and in different governance apparati. Here "policy" is broadly conceptualized, including all documents that articulate explicit regulatory changes (in policy, technology, society, cultural practice, ...) to the fabric of "life in heat" – for example regional plans, building projects, funding schemes, legislation and regulation, or "public action". Through these – and further to be articulated – strategies of mapping the field, venture points for **coordinated action** will be identified. The methodological approach is geared towards finding new means for articulating and problematizing heat in broader, deliberative and democratic ways, as to facilitate an opening of the planning against/for heat beyond the confined regimes of currently existing apparatus of heat: to allow better communication and strategic planning between, amongst and within the decentral re-building efforts against heat, and simultaneously allow for a re-thinking of more open-ended, upstream and community based heat preparation. Experimental methods will be designed in-situ and along the research trajectory, with such broad options as community organized heat walks, mapping projects, sensory experiments and interventions, or artistic/design interventions in public space.
 * Methodological **

Thinking heat cosmopolitically reveals social injustices across scales, and the social, cultural, epistemological, and technological conditions in which they are produced and held in place. Thinking governance beyond its governmental institutionalized locations allows to reveal the dynamic ways of re-thinking and re-imaging social and technological orders, allowing to bring into perspective new actors that fundamentally shape how governing heat unfolds and plays out. This study is committed to such a multi-positional gaze, as it seeks to articulate and foreground the injustices, inequalities, oppression and ignorance build into the complex ways heat is governed and heat-resilience is build towards. Looking at three regions in New York State, as well as another comparative site tbc, in such ways, this study yet does not only seek to problematize, but to actively contribute to a more open and inclusive environmental governance.
 * Empirical **

The three regions in New York State are chose for their specific characters: 1) NYC as a large urban acclomeration 2) The capital district (and parts of the central Hudson Valley) as economically diverse, and of urban as well as rural character 3) tba

A fourth region, outside NYS will be chose for comparative purposes. This site should meet in its current conditions those projected in the central sencarios for NYS used for climate and environmental planning, as provided by the IPCC and in referred to in the regional plans of NYS.

By these means this study will contribute to the conceptual understanding of governance in an expansive notion that moves beyond persistent institutional situating (government and regulatory bodies). It seeks to provide a stronger understanding of de-central governance and societal, technological and cultural re-desing and re-building. It further seeks to contribute to an emergent understanding of how such large-scale yet socially confined apperatus of governance can be efficiently opened up and designed deliberative and democratic, as such contributing also to the larger debates around community organization, activism and "science and the public". The research positions itself conceptually as well as empirically on the intersections between science, regulatory science, governance and "publics". Furthermore it will contribute to the importance of material, experiential, temporal, geographical and embodied knowledge and how it contains and opens up action across scales.
 * Conceptual/Theoretical **

As such, this study seeks to help improve the planning and re-building against heat, improve the under-articulated problematization of heat, especially towards different kinds of – often marginalized and overlooked publics – and strives to find new processes of governance that can be deliberative, democratic and can draw on situated knowledges of those most affected and simultaneously ignored.
 * Practical **