This paper explores how extreme heat is spatially and temporally imagined and how such imaginaries shape individual adaptation. It draws on a five month ethnography in Manchester – a temperate Global North city. I introduce ‘relative invulnerability’, a perceptual framework in which essentialist global imaginaries position extreme heat as a problem of the ‘Other’, often in the Global South, while temperate Global North contexts are equated with mastery over temporally rare heatwaves. Second, imagined ‘relative invulnerability’ materializes in what residents term ‘common sense’ adaptation – individual, low-cost, short-term and reactive behaviours. Against these findings, the paper first argues that the lived realities of extreme heat remain unevenly distributed – not only spatially, but also imaginatively. Second, perceptions of ‘relative invulnerability’ and a ‘common sense’ approach to adaptation reproduce vulnerabilities along lines already etched by neoliberal governance by obscuring the obligations of global north states for adaptation and reframing heat adaptation as an individual, entrepreneurial endeavour. Third I suggest that ‘common sense’ adaptation is inherently ideological, revealing people’s acceptance of the state’s retreat in climate change adaptation. This paper will be of interest to those interested in the everyday politics of vulnerability, climate adaptation, risk perceptions and how extreme heat is encountered ‘from below’.

Austerity governance is reshaping climate adaptation worldwide, yet its impacts on adaptation at the micro-scale remain overlooked. This paper shifts the analytical lens “downward” to examine how austerity effects individual’s everyday adaptation to extreme heat, contributing to a multi-scalar understanding of austerity and adaptation. Through five months of ethnography in a neighbourhood in Manchester, UK, the paper first identifies how individuals have low ‘value adaptation’, which underpins their engagement in short-term, reactive and low-cost everyday adaptation strategies. Second, austerity’s erosion of everyday infrastructures—water systems, libraries, swimming pools, parks, street furniture and shade infrastructure—has directly diminished everyday adaptive capacity rendering people more vulnerable to extreme heat. And by understanding austerity as a personal condition the paper argues that extreme heat will feel more physically unbearable for people at the sharpest end of the austerity cuts. By bridging debates across austerity and climate adaptation, austerity and everyday lives, and adaptation politics the paper argues that local authorities must reframe everyday infrastructures as essential climate adaptation systems. And everyday infrastructures must be (re)built after austerity if they are to serve as integrated climate adaptation infrastructures at the individual, neighbourhood, and city scales as temperatures continue to rise.