Cities on fire: Towards an elemental urbanism in the Anthropocene

This intervention outlines a new way of thinking about the growing entanglements between fire and urban life in the Anthropocene, calling for a dialogue between urban studies and elemental geographies as a conceptual lens that addresses the changing nature of nature in contemporary urban worlds. As wildfires increasingly impact cities—destroying infrastructure and property, displacing populations, and altering air quality across vast distances—fire emerges not only as risk and hazard but also as an elemental force reshaping the city’s political, material, and conceptual foundations. Our aim is twofold. First, we open a debate on an emerging urban condition of the Anthropocene where fire assumes a reinvigorated presence. Second, exploring analytical pathways for re-thinking cities on fire, we discuss connections between urban studies and elemental geographies—a growing subfield of cultural and political geography which engages with the elements as a way of thinking with Earth’s materialities. The resurgence of fire in the city, we contend, signals the growing presence of “elemental exposures” resulting from global environmental change and Anthropogenic climate and ecological emergencies. Following a review of fire scholarship within urban studies, we suggest an elemental rethinking of fire—not as a spatially distant or exceptional event but as a shared, co-constitutive, agentic, and persistent presence demanding collective responsibility and adaptation as well as novel ways of conceptualizing city–nature relationships. The resulting urban pyropolitics frames cities as dynamic, more-than-human sites of climate transformation and vulnerability, highlighting the unequal distribution of elemental exposure in the Anthropocene city and its racialized, gendered, and classed dimensions.