Summer in the city

As we are just coming out of the Spring equinox – the start of astronomical spring – Summer 2024 is looming on the horizon. It seems a good point to look back at Melting Metropolis activities last summer and what we are planning for this one.

2023 was the hottest year on record (in records dating back to 1850), knocking 2016 off top spot. Driven by El Niño and greenhouse gas emissions, air and sea temperatures rose, with the average temperature 1.48°C above pre-industrial levels. July and August 2023 were the hottest two months on record, with Europe’s summer the fifth warmest on record. The impacts of high temperatures were felt across the globe. Summer 2023 in New York was marked by smoke-filled skies and strange orange skies, fuelled by forest fires fumes billowing over from Canada.

To tease out how New Yorkers have experienced high temperatures in the past and present, Melting Metropolis team members Kara Schlichting and Bryony Ella ran a series of events with our project partner the Queens Memory Project. Kara curated an exhibition at the Queens Public Library, drawing on its rich archival visual materials, including postcards of Rockaway Beach, ice creams, and – of course – gushing water hydrants. Craft workshops ran alongside the exhibition, at Queens Library and the 34 Ave Open Streets in Jackson Heights, and we also co-hosted an Open Newsroom with The City newspaper.

In July, Bryony Ella led Drawing Heat walkshops in Jamaica, Queens. Building on her Wild Drawing practice, these walkshops provided an opportunity to explore, through mark marking, the sensory and bodily experiences of heat.

This summer, Bryony, supported by Kara and project research assistant Fatma Zişan Tokaç, will be running more Drawing Heat walkshops in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, in conjunction with the Coal+Ice exhibition at the Asia Society. Please sign up to explore with us whatever the New York weather brings in summer 2024.