Draw a thermal map over almost any city and a second map appears underneath it, one that tracks tree canopy, pavement material, building height and, ultimately, income and race. Heat is not distributed evenly, and intra-urban temperature differences can be large enough to expose inequalities that city-wide averages conceal. What makes heat analytically useful is its material directness: thermal exposure registers planning decisions on bodies and surfaces even when official narratives describe service provision as equal. A thermal camera does not care about a municipality's official narrative of equal service provision. HeatSentence names the way a temperature differential functions as a verdict already delivered before any report is written — a sentence in both the linguistic and judicial sense, pronounced by infrastructure rather than by a court. Climate urbanism that treats heat purely as an engineering problem, solvable with more reflective paint, misses that the paint was never distributed evenly either.
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