Spatial planning for thermal comfort justice in an era of climate extremes: The case of Mardin, Türkiye

Date

2025-10-01

Author

Peker, Ender
Street, Emma

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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To date, thermal comfort has been predominantly understood either as an individual (bodily) issue to be modified for those able to via consumption-side measures such as air conditioning, or as a technical question requiring adaptations predominantly at the building scale. Contributing to literature at the interface of critical temperature, urban heat and climate justice studies and spatial planning, the paper frames thermal (dis)comfort as a critical urban governance and social justice issue. The paper considers the potential of spatial planning systems to deliver more thermally-just built environments. Presenting an illustrative case study of the city of Mardin in south-eastern Türkiye, it explores the barriers to planning for thermally comfortable urban environments in the context of extreme heat. The results show that while the city's planning systems are procedurally robust, they fail to position thermal (dis)comfort as a socio-spatial justice issue requiring a scalar (e.g. city-level) response. Drawing on the case study, and the literature review, the paper presents a two-stage set of recommendations to embed thermal comfort justice within planning systems.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116330

Collections

Department of City and Regional Planning, Article