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Humans, increasingly, manufacturer their own air. In and around the three-dimensional aerial environments within and above urban regions, this manufacture of air reaches particular levels of intensity. For a species which expires without air in two or three minutes, this anthropogenic manufacture of air is of incalculable importance. Curiously, however, urban air remains remarkably neglected within the political-ecological literatures. Accordingly, this paper suggests a range of key themes which a political ecology of urban air needs to address. These address, in turn, the links between global warming, urban heart-island effects and killer urban heat-waves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; horizontal movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of vertical condominiums structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterised air-conditioned urbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasingly hot climates; and, finally, the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments.
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Life-‐Support: The Poli2cal Ecology of Urban Air
Stephen Graham Newcastle University
‘City air makes one free’? (The words carved over the city gates of the Hansea2c League, a
network of trading ci2es in medieval Europe)
Introduc)on: 1915 and the “Defencelessness of Breathing” (Elias Cane), 1987)
“At first we feel nothing, we are insensi2ve, we are naturalized. And then suddenly we feel not something , but the absence of something we did not know before could possibly be lacking. Think of the poor soldiers on the front line, deep in their trenches, the 22nd of April 1915 near Ypres. They knew everything about bullets, shells, rats, death, mud, and fear—but air, they did not feel air, they just breathed it. And then, from this ugly, slow-‐moving, greenish cloud lingering over them, air is being removed. They begin to suffocate. Air has entered the list of what could be withdrawn from us. In the terms of the great German thinker Peter Sloterdijk, air has been made explicit; air has been reconfigured; it is now part of an air-‐condi2oning system that makes our life possible.” Bruno Latour
“An implicit condi2on of existence” (Sloterdijk, 2009).
Anthropocenic Atmospheres: The Machinic Manufacture of Air
Urban Domes
Where is the Poli2cal Ecology of Urban Air?
“Urban poli2cal ecology research has so far been focused on natural resources for consump2on, produc2on, and recrea2on,
rather than on environmental pollu2on” (Véron, 2006)
‘Technical’, depoli2cised, medicalised, physical-‐geographic
and public health policy discourses dominate
Raymond Bryant diagnosed over
fieeen years ago that “the exis2ng literature [on changing air quality]
is largely devoid of poli2cal analysis'', a problem which
inevitably works to obfuscate the ways in which ``unequal power rela2ons are [] `inscribed' in the
air” (1998)
Some Progress: Environmental Jus2ce
and Medical Anthropology.
But These Fail to Situate the Poli2cal Ecology of Urban Air Within Socio-‐
Natural and Techno-‐Natural Metabolism and the Mul2scale Poli2cs of
Urban Nature
“The cars burning fuels from distant oil-‐deposits and pumping CO2 into the air, affec2ng people, forests, climates, and geopoli2cal condi2ons around the globe,” they wrote, “ further complete the global geographic mappings and traces that flow through the urban and ‘produce’ London as a palimpsest of densely layered bodily, local, na2onal and global—but depressingly uneven
geographically— socioecological processes”(Erik Swyngedouw and Nick Heynen, 2003)
“Air maqers too liqle in social theory. Aside from signifying a loss of grounding, air is as taken for granted in theory as it is in most of our daily breaths. [] Air is lee to drie […] neither theorized nor examined, taken simply as solidity’s lack. There seems at first to be no
reason not to let it” (Tim Choy, 2010)
Curiously Ignored by Debates on Ci2es and Climate Change, a Ver2cal Turn, ‘Planetary Urbanisa2on’, Urban Affect and
Atmosphere...
A cri2cal poli2cal ecology of urban air needed to make explicit the systema2c
anthropogenic and machinic manufacture and material
condi2oning of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ air, through design, technoscience, capitalist industrialism, militarism, warfare, commodifica2on, consumerism, and so forth.
“This is Sloterdijk’s explicitness. You are on life support, it’s fragile, it’s
technical, it’s public, it’s poli2cal, it could break down—it is breaking
down—it’s being fixed, you are not too confident of those who fix it.
Our current condi2on merely relies on our more explicit understanding
that this tenta2ve technological system, this “life support,” entails
the whole planet—even its atmosphere.” (Bruno Latour, 2005).
“You Are on Life-‐Support...”.
Eight Themes...
(i) links between global warming, urban heat-‐island effects and killer urban heat-‐waves; (ii) urban pollu2on crises; (iii) paradoxes of urban pollu2on; (iv) horizontal movements of polluted air (v) ver2cal poli2cs of urban air and the construc2on of ver2cal condominiums structures for elites; (vi) vicious circles that characterised air-‐condi2oned urbanism; (vii) heat-‐related deaths of workers building air-‐condi2oned structures in increasingly hot climates; and, finally (viii) growth of large-‐scale air-‐condi2oned environments.
(i) Heat Islands and Killer Heat Waves
“The U.S. Environmental Protec2on Agency es2mates that, between 1979 and 2003, heat exposure has caused more than the number of mortali2es resul2ng from hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined.” (NASA, 2010).
Urban Planet, Warming Planet..
Systema2c inequality, housing policies, poor urban design and hopelessly inadequate emergency
response arrangements can combine together to allow urban heat-‐waves to become mass killers of
the poor, the lonely, the old, the weak and the vulnerable
. Epidemiological studies have shown that there is a “significantly increased risk of hospitaliza2on for
mul2ple diseases, including cardiovascular disease, ischemic heart disease, ischemic stroke,
respiratory disease, pneumonia, dehydra2on, heat stroke, diabetes, and acute renal failure, with a
10°F increase in same-‐day apparent temperature” due to urban heat waves (Ostro et al, 2010).
Chicago, July1995
By Friday, July 14, “thousands of Chicagoans had developed severe heat-‐related illnesses. Paramedics couldn't keep up with emergency calls, and city hospitals were overwhelmed. Twenty-‐three hospitals—most on the South and Southwest Sides—went on bypass status, closing the doors of their emergency rooms to new pa2ents. Some ambulance crews drove around the city for miles looking for an open bed. Hundreds of vic2ms never made it to a hospital. The most overcrowded place in the city was the
Cook County Medical Examiners Office, where police transported hundreds of bodies for autopsies.” (Klinenberg,
2002) .
Europe 2003
Deaths of the “Forgoqen”
Chambers de Bonne: Hidden, Ver2cal Geographies of Vulnerability
(ii) Toxic Domes
“Air...from Johannesburg to Tehran, to Delhi to Jakarta, isn’t about aesthe2cs, or even possible climate change at some point
in the future: it’s about life and death now” (Doyle and Risely, 2008).
Not New: Miasma, ‘Pea Soupers’, Industrial ‘Accidents’ etc..
But Exponen2al Growth: 7 Million Deaths in 2012 (WHO)
“The risks from air pollu2on are now far
greater than previously thought or understood,
par2cularly for heart disease and strokes,
Few risks have a greater impact on global health today than air pollu2on; the evidence signals the
need for concerted ac2on to clean up the air we all breathe.” (WHO, 2014).
China and India Dominate...
Trapped...Topographies and Inversions
‘Airquakes’
“Can a set of ontological rights — such as breathing — actually challenge or even displace economic
hegemony?” The unbearable urban air within many Chinese ci2es works to “brings the elements of our life-‐world out of a background of neglect and foregrounds them as the ontological precondi2ons of human existence.” Albert
Pope (2009)
As an Addendum... Poli%cal Airquakes....
(iii) Pollu2on Paradoxes: City Branding
Re-‐Engineering Air for Urban Spectacles
Propagandist Pronouncements...
‘Nuclear Winters’: Interrup2ng Urban Poli2cal Ecologies of Agriculture
Tourism Economies
Disneyfica2on Paradoxes
Smog Simulacra
Aesthe2c and Affec2ve Experiences of Ci2es
Giuditata Vendrame: the thickening haze of Shanghai’s polluted air “oeen imbue[d] the city with a par2cular
sense of lightness, suspension and fragility.” “The city gains visual and architectural quali2es,” she writes. “The light of the sunbeams penetrates this
foggy layer, giving the city a magic and fairytale color. However, this ‘magical haze” is harmful. It is smog, air
pollu2on.” (Vendrame, 2012).
(iv) Downwind
Offshoring Not a Complete
Insulator Between 12 and 24% of the sulphur pollutants in
the Western United States had been blown there
from industrial and urban sites on China by
atmospheric wind systems
(v) Airy Refuges, Human Sinks: Ver2cal Architectures as “Spa2alized Immune Systems”
“One can […] discern a poli2cal-‐economic geography of air” (Choy, 2010)
Ascension of the Elites “The rich have access to good air while the poor are
relegated to the dregs, to the smog and dust under flyovers or on the streets” ` (Tim Choy, 2010)
“One could [..] lament the splintering of the atmosphere.” (Caney, 1987).
“In the typical street canyons of Hong Kong, air pollutants tend to be trapped in the boqom 15 m.” (Wong et al, 2012).
Massive podium blocks between the streets and the raised walkways in Hong Kong “not only block most of the wind to pedestrians (affec2ng comfort and air quality), but also minimize the “air volume” near the
pedestrian level (affec2ng air quality).” (Ng, 2009).
(vi) Fragmen2ng Atmospheres: Vicious Circles of the Air-‐Con City
`’But where is Utopia, where the weather is 64.4°F...?” (Le Corbusier, 1967).
Major Urban and Demographic Shies are Air-‐Condi%oned Geo-‐Economic Transforma%ons
Air-‐Con Landscapes
Heat Dumping Further Exaggerate Heat Islands and Heat Emergencies: Paris, 2003
Blackouts: “Turning buildings into refrigerators burns fossil fuels, which emits greenhouse gases, which raises global temperatures, which creates a need for -‐-‐ you
guessed it -‐-‐ more air-‐condi2oning” (Hutchinson, 2010).
From Comfort to Survival: “Ownership and usage of air-‐condi2oners significantly reduce[s] the effects of
temperature” on the wide range of condi2ons, diseases and ailments that can become killers during urban heat
waves (Ostro et al, 2010).
Inadequate Public Policies: Market Hegemony
Two vicious circles: Heat displacement and Power/Fossil Fuels
(vii) Citadels of Death : Hot Bodies, Cooled Bodies, Atmospheric Apartheid
“As many people
are killed on construc2on sites throughout the
world each year as die as a result of
armed conflict” (Na2onal Examina2on Board
in Occupa2onal Safety and Health,
n.d).
880 migrant construc2on workers died in the UAE in 2004 alone
“As many as 5,000 construc2on workers per month were brought into the accident and emergency
department of Rashid Hospital in Dubai during July and August 2004” (Human Rights Watch, 2006).
“Dream-‐ worlds of
neoliberalism”
Aeer the UK’s shadow sports minister, Clive Efford, expressed revulsion at the latest revela2ons of worker deaths in Qatar, Maher Mughrabi wondered: “ Where exactly has this man been?” Dubai, Qatar and Bahrain have been hos2ng the stars of golf, tennis, snooker, formula one and, of course, horse racing for decades now. And all those holidaymakers in Dubai who have sampled the shopping fes2val, the mall with the indoor ski slope or zooming up in the lie of the world's tallest building should also know that all this was built through the same system of labour that is suddenly so appalling” (2013).
(viii) Climate Capsules: Echoes of Buckminster Fuller
“The air starts to become private” (Vendrame, 2012) “Let us not forget that today’s so-‐called consumer society was invented in a greenhouse – in the very same glass-‐canopied, nineteenth century arcades in which the first genera2on of ‘experience customers’ learned to breathe the intoxica2ng scent of an enclosed, interior-‐world full of commodi2es” (Dorrian, 2012).
“More pure, less polluted, and hence more ‘itself’ than in the world beyond, albeit now as
commodity.” (Dorian, 2012).
Machinic Capsularisa2on of Urban Natures Within Secessionary, Elite ‘Bubbles’
Dome Megastructures?
Conclusion: The ‘Right to the City’ as the Right to Breathe!
• ‘Poli2cs, from now on, will be a sec2on of the technology of climate-‐control’. Peter Sloterdijk
• A ver%cally-‐sensi%ve and cri%cal poli2cal ecology of urban air is urgently needed!
• Cabin Ecologies and elite utopias: Commodifica2on, life-‐support, social abandonment within post-‐natural urban ecologies and increasingly inhospitable ‘techno-‐natures’
• The poli2cal ecologies of contemporary urban air are heavily shaped by contradic2ons between the mass and density of increasingly hot and toxic urban atmospheres, and prolifera2ng dreams of controlled and cooled microclimates, both mobile and sta2c, for elites, , organised around neoliberalised consump2on, work with oeen murderous injus2ce.
“People feel very strongly.” writes Giudiqa Vendrame (2012), “that their private construc2ons of immunity are endangered by the presence of too many construc2ons of immune spheres which are pressed against each other and destroy each other.” Thus, urbanites: “feel compressed within these overcrowded spaces. We feel suffocated. As if there isn’t enough space. As if there isn't enough air for us. On one side the fear of suffoca2on, of no-‐breath. On the other (out)side the fear of the unknown, the invisible [hazards of urban air pollu2on].” “Which is and which will be our rela2onship. to the air? ”, Vendrame asks. “What sort of air do we breath on the inside and outside of our spaces?” (ibid.),
So Far Incremental Explora2ons: Geothermal Air-‐Con
‘Green’ Buildings
Planning for
Heat Emergencies
Vegeta2on Roofs and Walls
Urban Whi2ng
