Rethinking social vulnerability in the wildland–urban interface: an iterative dialogue between ethnography and vulnerability indices in Barcelona

Abstract In recent years, wildfire research has increasingly incorporated the concept of social vulnerability to better understand differential exposure and response capacities in wildland–urban interface (WUI) contexts. However, different methodological traditions conceptualize the social dimensions of vulnerability in diverse ways. While indicator-based models typically represent vulnerability through sociodemographic and socioeconomic attributes of populations and territories, more relational and contextual approaches emphasize the situated processes through which vulnerability takes shape in specific places and communities. This article examines how these different methodological approaches produce distinct and only partially commensurable forms of knowledge about social vulnerability in WUI settings. Drawing on an interdisciplinary research project in Barcelona’s mountain neighborhoods, we bring an indicator-based analysis into relation with ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two neighborhoods. The results show that vulnerability indices are useful for situating these territories within broader metropolitan patterns of inequality, while also producing partially divergent vulnerability profiles depending on the dimensions and scales mobilized. Ethnographic research traces how conditions such as aging, mobility, maintenance, infrastructures, care arrangements, and institutional relations shape vulnerability through the ways they come together in particular settings. It also shows how conditions associated with vulnerability may coexist with local knowledge, mutual support, and capacities for action. Rather than treating one approach as more comprehensive than the other, the article argues that their value lies in keeping these different forms of knowledge in an iterative relationship. Convergences, tensions, and misalignments between indicators and ethnography help reveal how vulnerability is configured through situated socio-material relations while preserving the comparative value of indicator-based approaches. This methodological dialogue can support a layered and operationally relevant approach to vulnerability assessment in complex WUI environments.