In Taiwan, Summer Is a Season of Anticipation - And Fire

In settlements with a repeated history of fires, residents often describe summer as synonymous with fire risk. This association reflects lived experience rather than abstract understanding, an experience shaped by the ways in which heat, everyday routines and past fires have intertwined over time. That's certainly the case with Taiwan, where conversations with residents about rising temperatures almost inevitably return to one fear: that a fire will break out.

It’s a fear shaped by past incidents, and the knowledge of how quickly fires spread in the settlement. Residents speak about fire not as a surprise event but as something expected to accompany hot weather, even as they try to prevent it. This anticipation shapes how people move, relax and socialise - while remaining vigilant - during the summer months.

Summer and Fire in Taiwan

Taiwan is a densely populated informal settlement in Khayelitsha, Cape Town with a long history of shack fires and infrastructural vulnerability. Summer in Taiwan is therefore not only a season of heat but a period in which fire is actively anticipated. For residents in Taiwan, summer means fire.

Informal houses are prone to temperature fluctuations due to high thermal conductivity of the sheet metal (‘zincs’) used in their construction and its low thermal resistance to heat transfer between the exterior and the interior of the shack.

As a result, remaining indoors during the day becomes unbearable during periods of extreme heat, pushing residents into shared outdoor spaces for relief.

“It’s even difficult to sit in the house [in summer],” notes Ntondo, one of the few residents in the Maphelo section to have a big enough yard, allowing her to sit outside safely.

As Taiwan has grown and become increasingly crowded, open yard space has largely disappeared. Houses are built extremely close together, often with little to no space between structures, allowing fires to spread rapidly. The few residents who still have yards are typically those who secured larger plots when the settlement was first established.

School holidays further intensify this dynamic, as more people, especially children and visitors, spend prolonged periods outdoors.

Now with everyone outside, what happens inside can be missed - including the heating of electrical wires and forgotten pots on the stove… which then can start fires.

“When cooking, it is important to look at the electric wires because they get hot, it's important not to cook and leave them unattended because we live in an informal settlement and it can burn. Also when you walk in the house the wires are so hot; almost like they can electrocute you because of the heat,” Tokyo section leader Zona says - and she speaks from experience: in 2025, their section was ravaged by a large fire.

Heat also increases fire risk by putting strain on informal electrical infrastructure, as informally connected wires are more likely to overheat, degrade and spark during prolonged high temperatures.

And even in the absence of overtly unsafe actions, summer produces a heightened state of fire risk. As Cape Town is a winter-rainfall region, summer heat coincides with dry vegetation and accumulated combustible materials, increasing the likelihood that fires ignite and spread rapidly.

At the same time, summer heat places additional strain on health, particularly for residents living with non-communicable diseases such as high blood pressure, who cannot leave the house without taking their medication otherwise they risk dizzy spells and even fainting. For these individuals, coping with heat is inseparable from managing medication, hydration and mobility, often under conditions where water, electricity and rest are not reliably available.

The effect of climate change on health is as severe as its impact on the built environment, and they are felt most intensely in vulnerable settlements. Socio-economic and environmental conditions limit residents’ ability to respond effectively, no matter how hard they try.

Summertime also marks a period of increased migration between Cape Town and the Eastern Cape - meaning many households are partially absent or hosting visitors during this time.

These visitors do not always share the same long-term embodied knowledge of living with environmental risk in Taiwan. Unlike long-term residents who carry the memories and trauma of repeated fires, visitors often lack an acute awareness of how quickly small actions such as overloading a plug or leaving a stove unattended can result in disaster. As a result, risk management becomes unevenly distributed, falling disproportionately on those with lived experience.

Fire Fairness: Shared Risks, But Not Responsibilities

Fires in Taiwan make visible the shared risks of living in informal conditions. Density, heat, informal electricity and seasonal population shifts mean that individuals’ actions rarely affect only one household. Fires spread quickly, crossing domestic boundaries and turning private spaces into collective concerns. Thimna reflected that at times, “some kids help when it is burning, especially if it is their own home. I see them helping before the fire brigade arrives.”

People also become less cautious in summer, residents say. They stay up late, hanging out and cooking whilst under the influence - and in that state, they may ignore the risks they live with.

“When it’s hot, it really becomes hot. Then you get those who are frying meat whilst drunk over the weekend; that also causes issues for us, so now we need to work together in trying to look after their shacks so that they don’t cause any fire,” says Ntondo.

Here, summer is not only a season of heat, but a period where responsibility, risk, and bodily strain converge, producing conditions in which fire is anticipated, feared, and difficult to prevent despite residents’ ongoing efforts. It is not anticipated only because of carelessness, but because residents are acutely aware of how heat interacts with crowded living conditions, informal electrical connections, flammable materials and exhaustion.

Life in informal settlements forces residents to manage risks they did not create and cannot fully control. Residents know that the density of the settlement spreads fires; just as they recognise how the landscape contributes to flooding and waterlogging during heavy rains. While visitors or outsiders may learn about these risks through explanations or observation they never truly know them or carry the weight of long-lived experience. This means that, while the risks are collectively and structurally produced, the responsibility for preventing fires is informally shifted onto those who have endured it repeatedly.

Fire prevention in Taiwan, therefore, is not simply about individual carelessness or vigilance. It is shaped by structural conditions that remain unchanged even as responsibility is unevenly placed on residents most familiar with the dangers.

For community leader and long-time Taiwan township resident Thimna, extreme heat and the threat of fire are inseparable in summer. Thimna’s fear is not abstract; it is rooted in repeated experiences of fire during hot periods in the settlement.

In short: Not everyone experiences summer the same way. When multiple small risks overlap- heat, informal electricity, unattended homes, intoxicated cooking, crowding, and seasonal migration- they compound rather than operate independently. None of these factors alone necessarily leads to fire, but together they create a condition in which fire becomes more likely and harder to prevent. This shows that fires are not random accidents, but the outcome of layered vulnerabilities that peak during summer - and when they do, it’s often the poor and vulnerable who suffer.

As community leader Thimna notes: “[Our life] becomes worse because we are victims of fires. We are those kinds of people and it’s not nice.”

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