The temperature that matters to a pedestrian is rarely the one reported on the evening forecast; it is the temperature two metres above the specific pavement they are standing on, shaped by the colour of that pavement, the presence or absence of a nearby tree, the reflectivity of the glass facade across the street. Urban life is lived almost entirely at this microclimatic scale, which official weather data does not capture and most urban design does not deliberately shape, despite having enormous influence over it. A block can be three degrees hotter or cooler than its official city reading depending on choices made decades earlier by people who never thought of themselves as climate designers. HeatSentence recurs here at its most granular: comfort or discomfort gets handed down block by block, almost material by material, well before any policy language about climate adaptation gets involved. Treating heat only at the scale of city-wide averages misses where people actually live inside the number.
