Aesthetic commoning, social data and wildfire management

This paper explores how wildfire data and reporting might be enhanced with knowledge of ‘aesthetic’ experience that allows UK and European fire and rescue services, wildfire responsible agencies and government policy to better understand and manage wildfires that occur at wildland-urban interfaces (WUI). With the rise in global temperatures brought about by climate change, wildfires have become an increasingly hazardous socio-environmental risk at the interstices and edgelands that bifurcate the rural and the urban. Furthermore, fire scientists are now witnessing larger and more severe wildfires that exceed current wildfire models and such fires are expected to increase in frequency as the climate warms and protracted drought conditions become more frequent in the Europe and the UK. At present, wildfires remain poorly understood as sociomaterial events, as there is a distinct lack of ‘social’ data for wildfire analysis and modelling and, where such data does exist, it is somewhat crude, reflecting the rudimentary nature of wildfire psicosocial data more generally. If, however, as Sehgal and Wilkie argue (2024), knowledge and social processes are primarily aesthetic and, as Latour contended, new modes of sensitisation are required to address matters of concern, then new techniques for producing aesthetic data are required that supplement and enhance ‘social’ data. This paper proposes three techniques of more-than-human enquiry (Whatmore, 2002) that each explore different aspects of aesthetic engagement with social data and how data might become aestheticized. In so doing, the paper explores how aesthetic commoning might enhance wildfire management.