The sun shines all over the city — but heatwaves hit different in Taiwan
On the week of 9 March 2026, I went in to do fieldwork in Taiwan — in the middle of Cape Town's first major week-long heatwave for the year.
As heatwaves go, it was a big one, particularly by local standards. The advisory warned of persistently high temperatures and potential health risks. This was shared on social media and reported on the news. But it wasn't only predicted and reported — it was felt all over. Just not quite the same way everywhere.
It's very hot, it's very hot. I think that 40 degrees they were talking about — maybe the sun is close.
Everyone I spoke to, saw and interviewed in Taiwan that day wanted to share their experience.
It was a very interesting — and sweaty — day. When we got to the field, many residents were sitting in the shade, shirtless, sharing ice-cold bottles of water. Kids were playing with water, throwing each other with it, or filling the basin and laying in it outside. Jola told us they had been sitting outside since 8am: "the weather is punishing us… it's only now that we are getting some wind that is cooling us nicely." It was just too hot to stay indoors, where the metal shacks trapped and intensified the heat.
There were only a few people walking the street alongside us, including the street and toilet cleaners — overalls peeled down to the waist, retreating into the shade. They had started before sunrise and were now just waiting for their shifts to end. To show their supervisors they were 'working', whenever they spotted a piece of paper they would leave the comfort of the shade to pick it up and quickly return. The shade they sought — along walls or houses — functioned as a form of protection. Movement, labour and visibility in the community had reorganised themselves around heat avoidance.
That day I interviewed three project participants. Walking to each house in the heat — a good 10-minute trip each time — was not fun. We carried bottled water from home, still cold.
By the time the community gatekeeper and I got to the second interview, our bottled water was warm. We stood in doorways waiting to be let in, the heat already heavy on our backs.
By the time we got to the third, we were begging for cold water and some shade for us to sit in. Some residents were able to oblige, but this depended on having electricity and appliances that could cope. Others explained that keeping water cold was difficult — fridges struggled to work efficiently in the extreme heat, or had to be switched off entirely to avoid overheating and risking a fire.
Participants had received warning about the heatwave mainly from the local leadership groups, from their children's schools, and on Facebook. Despite that, people were shocked at the heat — many because it was their first time experiencing anything like it in the area. They insisted that in all of their 20–30 years of living in Cape Town, they had never felt such heat. "Usually, the highest temperature is around 31 or 32 degrees, not 41," one resident shared. Others said they had experienced it when they worked in the winelands and on the farms outside of Cape Town's central city area.
Comparisons to previous work suggest that this level of heat was once considered unusual for the City, reinforcing the perception that climatic conditions are shifting. Moreover, the extreme heat is not merely an inconvenience — it intensifies daily challenges related to housing quality, access to electricity and water. Poorly insulated housing amplifies heat exposure; water use increases at the same time that cooling is already strained; and electricity becomes both essential for cooling and a source of risk due to informal connections.
It's hot, it's hot, there is not a single day that it hasn't been. Our high blood pressure is rising. I am sweating so much right now; there is not even wind. We are out of electricity as well because technicians are here, so we don't even have cold water to drink to reduce our high blood pressure. I don't feel well. My feet and hands are swollen. My eyes are even hurting me. I don't know — my body is not well at all, at all. It is sore.
The heatwave may have affected the whole of Cape Town, but it impacted residents differently. For those in Taiwan, only those with yards could keep their doors and windows open until midnight. Households with informal electricity connections had to switch off their plugs to avoid overheating and risking a fire.
The community is densely populated. Having a yard is not common — those who have one are residents who built their homes in the early days of Taiwan, before it became overcrowded.
And even with all that — with heightened vigilance, with leaders warning, with neighbours watching — a section of the community still experienced a fire over that weekend. Fortunately only a few houses were affected. The fire occurred in DT Section, Maphelo. Residents lost their belongings and were forced to rely on donations from community leadership and other residents to begin the process of rebuilding.
This shows how the fear of fire is grounded in lived reality, and how extreme heat creates conditions in which fire remains difficult to prevent. The fire occurred alongside heightened vigilance — not carelessness. It reinforces the sense that summer brings unavoidable risk for those living in informal settlements where structural vulnerabilities remain unchanged.
The fieldwork observations reveal how extreme heat shaped behaviour — forcing people outdoors to seek shade, disrupting work routines, increasing health risks such as high blood pressure and dehydration, and heightening the fear of fire outbreaks.
I have high blood pressure but I cannot drink water — I am talking about tap water, because it is hot. My fridge cannot freeze things because of this sun. After washing, I go to put on my Vaseline. I found it melted. The polish for shoes also. Before, we knew that butter and other common things melt in the sun — but not vaseline. How can it? So now we have to use it in that state.
The heat harmed us this whole week. It was worse yesterday. We were sitting outside. I slept maybe around 11pm; it was hot, blazing hot, hot, hot, hot. No man, yesterday was hard, I don't want to lie. Even today it was hard. I don't know about tomorrow. The sun is ill-treating us. It's like the sun is right here. We even get nosebleeds — yesterday I had a nosebleed. No man, it must go, it must go, it must go. We have had enough of it now.
These narratives point to more than short-term discomfort. They reflect a growing sense of environmental stress, uncertainty and vulnerability — as residents struggle to adapt to increasingly extreme temperatures with limited resources. Collectively, these experiences underscore how climate variability is both felt and understood at a community level, where the impacts of heatwaves intersect with inequality, infrastructure constraints, and everyday survival.
