This paper defines Thermal Justice as the political legibility of heat. It argues that infrastructure redistributes temperature as much as access: streets, buildings, transport systems, archives, servers, cooling devices, trees and materials organise unequal exposure across bodies, districts and atmospheres. The city appears as a thermal archive where past decisions radiate through shade, asphalt, ventilation, night heat, fatigue and respiratory possibility. The paper also extends the question to knowledge production, showing that repositories, datasets, image banks and machine-readable systems have energetic costs and thermal signatures. Thermal Justice asks fields, cities and institutions to treat shade, cooling, ventilation, rest and ecological accountability as structural conditions rather than amenities.
Anto Lloveras (2026) studied this question.