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.
Life-support: The Political Ecology of Urban Air (Presentation)Stephen Graham
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.
Life support: The political ecology of urban airStephen Graham
Humans, increasingly, manufacture 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 that 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 touch upon the links between global warming, urban heat-island effects
and killer urban heatwaves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; horizontal
movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of vertical
condominium structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterise air-conditioned
urbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasingly
hot climates; the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments; and, finally, the
manipulation of urban air through political violence.
Preliminary study of the relationship between new risk factors and traditiona...Global Risk Forum GRFDavos
Feng KONG1,3, Peijun SHI1,2,3, Shao SUN1,3, Man LI1,3
1State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology of Beijing Normal University, China; 2Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster of Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, China; 3Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management of Ministry of Civil Affairs and Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, China
Capitalist delusion and climate drift 1GRAZIA TANTA
Around the mid-nineteenth century Marx said that philosophers had hitherto endeavoured to understand the world; and that it was time to transform it. Seventeen decades later, this idea screams in our ears.
Put in another way: there is no solution to environmental problems within the capitalist model
1 – Introduction
2 – Environmental management by capitalists and their employees
3 – Climate change - causes and effects
a) Ineluctable absence of human interference cases
b) Historical and current impacts of capitalist development
c) Environmental management as done by multinationals and their employees
Life-support: The Political Ecology of Urban Air (Presentation)Stephen Graham
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.
Life support: The political ecology of urban airStephen Graham
Humans, increasingly, manufacture 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 that 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 touch upon the links between global warming, urban heat-island effects
and killer urban heatwaves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; horizontal
movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of vertical
condominium structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterise air-conditioned
urbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasingly
hot climates; the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments; and, finally, the
manipulation of urban air through political violence.
Preliminary study of the relationship between new risk factors and traditiona...Global Risk Forum GRFDavos
Feng KONG1,3, Peijun SHI1,2,3, Shao SUN1,3, Man LI1,3
1State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology of Beijing Normal University, China; 2Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster of Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, China; 3Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management of Ministry of Civil Affairs and Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, China
Capitalist delusion and climate drift 1GRAZIA TANTA
Around the mid-nineteenth century Marx said that philosophers had hitherto endeavoured to understand the world; and that it was time to transform it. Seventeen decades later, this idea screams in our ears.
Put in another way: there is no solution to environmental problems within the capitalist model
1 – Introduction
2 – Environmental management by capitalists and their employees
3 – Climate change - causes and effects
a) Ineluctable absence of human interference cases
b) Historical and current impacts of capitalist development
c) Environmental management as done by multinationals and their employees
Stephen graham anthropocenic city: nature, security and cyborg urbanisationStephen Graham
A presentation outlining new ways of thinking about the links between cities and nature which draws out implications for how we address global climate change, injustice and urbanisation
Multidisciplinary Journal Supported by TETFund. The journals would publish papers covering a wide range of subjects in journal science, management science, educational, agricultural, architectural, accounting and finance, business administration, entrepreneurship, business education, all journals
Pollution under International Environmental LawAJHSSR Journal
ABSTRACT: Various activities of humans especially in the industrial world in any given civilized State pose
serious threat to the existence of man by way of emitting various pollutants into the environment (water,
atmosphere, soil etc.) As a result of these emissions of pollutants, sovereign States have made efforts to protect
the environment from pollution internationally. This is owing to the fact that man‟s existence on earth is
constantly being seriously threatened as a result of activities from civilized living. Pollution of the environment
occurs in almost every industrial activity as a result of emissions of pollutants. Notable examples of such acts of
pollution of the environment are air pollution by artificial heating using firewood, coal, gas or oil and the
burning of fossil fuels and forests – increases the atmospheric carbon dioxide and leads to increase in the
warmth of the earth. The research considered the various instruments regulating pollution in the international
plane. The research found that sovereign States should ensure that various industrial activities carried out within
their jurisdictions are so done in line with international standards and agreements so as not to cause damage to a
neighbouring State via pollution. More so, State parties to international agreements on protection of the
environment against pollution should uphold and apply the agreements in their various States.
KEYWORDS: Pollution, Environment
Climate Change & Its Implications to Livelihoods and Economic Development in...Dr. Joshua Zake
This paper was presented at the Climate Change workshop for Trocaire Partners in Lira Hotel, Lira, May 2008. The purpose of this briefing paper is to raise awareness about climate change, its social and economic development impacts in Uganda and hence the need for urgent actions by key stakeholders (including Government, Development Partners, Civil Society, Policy Makers, Political Leaders, Private Sector, Academia, Research Institutions, Cultural and Faith Based Leaders and Communities among others) towards adaptation and mitigation of the impacts of climate change at various levels. The paper defines key terms and concepts in the context of climate change; discuses and analyses the implications of climate change to livelihoods and economic development in light of current relevant policies and programs at International and National levels. Local and International examples are used to justify the implications of climate change. It also gives possible appropriate strategies at policy and practice level for consideration in addressing the impacts of climate change in Uganda.
151218 2 middletonj save the planet save the nhsJohn Middleton
Planetary health, ecological public health relationship between climate change and public health globally and locally.Part of Birmingham University International Masters seminar series
Zemtsov S.P. Hazardous hydrological phenomena and social vulnerability in RussiaStepan Zemtsov
The relevance of our research:
Climate change increases number of natural hazards
More than 10 million people are exposed in Russia
The main gap is social vulnerability assessment
The purpose of the research: to estimate influence of hydrological phenomena on social and economic development in Russia
The hypothesis:
real social loses from hydrological events are similar to economic damage but the first one is underestimated because of low “value of life”
Histories of the Future in Contemporary Megastructures
An exploration of the development of multi-level cities around the world, and their links to historic futurism
Stephen graham anthropocenic city: nature, security and cyborg urbanisationStephen Graham
A presentation outlining new ways of thinking about the links between cities and nature which draws out implications for how we address global climate change, injustice and urbanisation
Multidisciplinary Journal Supported by TETFund. The journals would publish papers covering a wide range of subjects in journal science, management science, educational, agricultural, architectural, accounting and finance, business administration, entrepreneurship, business education, all journals
Pollution under International Environmental LawAJHSSR Journal
ABSTRACT: Various activities of humans especially in the industrial world in any given civilized State pose
serious threat to the existence of man by way of emitting various pollutants into the environment (water,
atmosphere, soil etc.) As a result of these emissions of pollutants, sovereign States have made efforts to protect
the environment from pollution internationally. This is owing to the fact that man‟s existence on earth is
constantly being seriously threatened as a result of activities from civilized living. Pollution of the environment
occurs in almost every industrial activity as a result of emissions of pollutants. Notable examples of such acts of
pollution of the environment are air pollution by artificial heating using firewood, coal, gas or oil and the
burning of fossil fuels and forests – increases the atmospheric carbon dioxide and leads to increase in the
warmth of the earth. The research considered the various instruments regulating pollution in the international
plane. The research found that sovereign States should ensure that various industrial activities carried out within
their jurisdictions are so done in line with international standards and agreements so as not to cause damage to a
neighbouring State via pollution. More so, State parties to international agreements on protection of the
environment against pollution should uphold and apply the agreements in their various States.
KEYWORDS: Pollution, Environment
Climate Change & Its Implications to Livelihoods and Economic Development in...Dr. Joshua Zake
This paper was presented at the Climate Change workshop for Trocaire Partners in Lira Hotel, Lira, May 2008. The purpose of this briefing paper is to raise awareness about climate change, its social and economic development impacts in Uganda and hence the need for urgent actions by key stakeholders (including Government, Development Partners, Civil Society, Policy Makers, Political Leaders, Private Sector, Academia, Research Institutions, Cultural and Faith Based Leaders and Communities among others) towards adaptation and mitigation of the impacts of climate change at various levels. The paper defines key terms and concepts in the context of climate change; discuses and analyses the implications of climate change to livelihoods and economic development in light of current relevant policies and programs at International and National levels. Local and International examples are used to justify the implications of climate change. It also gives possible appropriate strategies at policy and practice level for consideration in addressing the impacts of climate change in Uganda.
151218 2 middletonj save the planet save the nhsJohn Middleton
Planetary health, ecological public health relationship between climate change and public health globally and locally.Part of Birmingham University International Masters seminar series
Zemtsov S.P. Hazardous hydrological phenomena and social vulnerability in RussiaStepan Zemtsov
The relevance of our research:
Climate change increases number of natural hazards
More than 10 million people are exposed in Russia
The main gap is social vulnerability assessment
The purpose of the research: to estimate influence of hydrological phenomena on social and economic development in Russia
The hypothesis:
real social loses from hydrological events are similar to economic damage but the first one is underestimated because of low “value of life”
Histories of the Future in Contemporary Megastructures
An exploration of the development of multi-level cities around the world, and their links to historic futurism
Vertical ground: making geology graham icus 2016Stephen Graham
Key note presentation at the Island Cities and Urban Archipelagos 2016. 07-12 March 2016, Hong Kong, University of Hong Kong
See http://www.islandcities.org/icua2016.html
This presentation is a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. It seeks, in particular, to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in many cities between the 1930s and 1970s and the contemporary proliferation of
radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the economistic orthodoxy, derived from the work of Edward
Glaeser, that contemporary housing crises are best addressed by removing state intervention
in housing production so that market-driven verticalisation can take place. The following two sections connect the rise of such orthodoxy with the ‘manufactured reality’—so
central to neo-liberal urban orthodoxy—that vertical social housing must necessarily fail because it deterministically creates social pathology. The remainder of the paper explores
in detail how the dominance of these narratives have been central to elite takeovers, and ‘luxification’, of the urban skies through the proliferation of condo towers for the super-rich.
Case studies are drawn from Vancouver, New York, London, Mumbai and Guatemala City and the broader vertical cultural and visual politics of the process are explored. The discussion finishes by exploring the challenges involved in contesting, and dismantling, the hegemonic dominance of vertical housing by elite interests in contemporary cities.
Super-tall and ultra-deep: The Politics of the ElevatorsStephen Graham
Entire libraries can be filled with volumes exploring the cultures, politics and geographies
of the largely horizontal mobilities and transportation infrastructures that are
intrinsic to urban modernity (highways, railways, subways, public transit and so on).
And yet the recent ‘mobilities turn’ has almost completely neglected the cultural
geographies and politics of vertical transportation within and between the buildings of
vertically-structured cityscapes. Attempting to rectify this neglect, this article seeks,
first, to bring elevator travel centrally into discussions about the cultural politics of
urban space and, second, to connect elevator urbanism to the even more neglected
worlds of elevator-based descent in ultra-deep mining. The article addresses, in turn:
the historical emergence of elevator urbanism; the cultural significance of the elevator
as spectacle; the global ‘race’ in elevator speed; shifts towards the ‘splintering’ of
elevator experiences; experiments with new mobility systems which blend elevators
and automobiles; problems of vertical abandonment; and, finally, the neglected vertical
politics of elevator-based ‘ultra-deep’ mining.
Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fictionStephen Graham
Unerringly, across its whole history, urban science fiction has offered up imagined cities that
operate about remarkably similar and highly verticalised visions. These are heavily dominated
by politics of class, resistance and revolution that are starkly organized around vertically
stratified and vertically exaggerated urban spaces. From the early and definitive efforts
of H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang, through J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, to many cyberpunk
classics, this essay – the latest in a series in City on the vertical dimensions of cities1 –
reflects on how vertical imaginaries in urban science fiction intersect with the politics and
contestations of the fast-verticalising cities around the world. The essay has four parts. It
begins by disentangling in detail the ways in which the sci-fi visions of Wells, Lang,
Ballard and various cyberpunk authors were centrally constituted through vertical structures,
landscapes, metaphors and allegories. The essay’s second part then teases out the
complex linkages between verticalised sci-fi imaginaries and material cityscapes that are
actually constructed, lived and experienced. Stressing the impossibility of some clean and
binary opposition between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ cities, the essay explores how verticalised
projects, material cities, sci-fi texts, imaginary futures, architectural schemes and urban theories
mingle and resonate together in complex, unpredictable and important ways which do
much to shape contemporary urban landscapes. The third section of the essay explores such
connections through the cases of retro-futuristic urban megaprojects in the Gulf and forests
of towers recently constructed in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The essay’s final discussion
draws on these cases to explore the possibilities that sci-fi imaginaries offer for contesting
the rapid verticalisation of cities around the world.
Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers Stephen Graham Stephen Graham
A presentation outlining some of the themes to my new book, 'Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers' (Verso, 2016).
"A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet
Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below.
Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He asks: why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth?
Vertical will make you look at the world around you anew: this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world."
See https://www.versobooks.com/books/2237-vertical
Urban climate science and urban planning: a history of missed encountersFionn MacKillop
Paper written with co-author on the history, organisations and practices of urban climate science and urban planning, and the missed opportunities for a deeper integration of the two disciplines, especially in terms of sustainability outcomes.
Ecological approaches in planning for sustainable cities A review of the lite...GJESM Publication
Rapid urbanization has brought environmentally, socially, and economically great challenges to cities
and societies. To build a sustainable city, these challenges need to be faced efficiently and successfully. This paper focuses on the environmental issues and investigates the ecological approaches for planning sustainable cities through a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. The review focuses on several differing aspects of sustainable city formation. The paper provides insights on the interaction between the natural environment and human activities by identifying environmental effects resulting from this interaction; provides an introduction to the concept of sustainable urban development by underlining the important role of ecological planning in achieving sustainable cities; introduces the notion of urban ecosystems by establishing principles for the management of their sustainability; describes urban
ecosystem sustainability assessment by introducing a review of current assessment methods, and; offers an outline of indexing urban environmental sustainability. The paper concludes with a summary of the findings.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS: WHITHER GLOBAL LEADERSHIP FOR MITIGA...TANKO AHMED fwc
This case study deliberates on the need for world governments, corporations and activists to form a united front against impending climate change catastrophes. It discusses causes, consequences and alleviation of mega disasters and inquires on common and shared responsibilities, predicaments, and smart utilization of global human and material resources. Theories of human response to sudden mass disruption and displacement often reckon with principles and practices in aid of managing mega disasters and critical geopolitics. A literature survey extracts serious concern and trends on traditional fixations of spatial imaginations hindering workable resolutions. The case study therefore elicits response to the need for global policies and strategies as nations would chaotically flow into one another in tragic mishandling of disasters. A stakeholders’ triangle of salvation with governments, corporations and activists may confront an impending Climageddon to provide feasible resolution to an end time Toba Event Hypothesis consistent with the climate change debacle.
Dynamics in the History and Economic Development of Man: Refocusing on Ecolog...AEIJjournal2
Man’s history and development endeavours have beenadvancing alongside a trail of ecological
ramifications and climate change. Since prehistoric times, scientists have not recorded an accelerated shift
in the ecologyof the planet during any other epoch beside that of modern man. The paper seeks to explore
how man’s history and developmentaffects ecologyand climate. It uses desk analysis to recollect data from
global assessment reportsand runs a One paired Sample Means t-Test, 1 tailed, 8 df, at Pearson
Correlation value 0.458 and 0.5 alpha level. Findings show that, there is globalclimate change, seen in
global warming trends; andimbalance in ecological footprint, seen in depletion of air, water and land
sinks. The t-Test reveals significant net loss of global forest cover.The study also,apparently found that,
processes ofdevelopment generally tend to damage ecology. Therefore,the study recommends a refocus to
sustainable means of development.
DYNAMICS IN THE HISTORY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF MAN: REFOCUSING ON ECOLOG...AEIJjournal2
Man’s history and development endeavours have beenadvancing alongside a trail of ecological
ramifications and climate change. Since prehistoric times, scientists have not recorded an accelerated shift
in the ecologyof the planet during any other epoch beside that of modern man. The paper seeks to explore
how man’s history and developmentaffects ecologyand climate. It uses desk analysis to recollect data from
global assessment reportsand runs a One paired Sample Means t-Test, 1 tailed, 8 df, at Pearson
Correlation value 0.458 and 0.5 alpha level. Findings show that, there is globalclimate change, seen in
global warming trends; andimbalance in ecological footprint, seen in depletion of air, water and land
sinks. The t-Test reveals significant net loss of global forest cover.The study also,apparently found that,
processes ofdevelopment generally tend to damage ecology. Therefore,the study recommends a refocus to
sustainable means of development.
Stephen graham Nature, Cities and the ‘Anthropocene’Stephen Graham
An analysis of what the idea of the 'Anthropocene' -- our latest Geological epoch marked by the human shaping of the Earth -- means for how we think about cities
Environmental Sociology deals with the interactions between societies and their environments. It focuses on the social dimensions of either the natural environment or the human built environment with the aim to investigate the human, economic, and political causes of climate change, as well as the effects climate change has on many aspects of social life, like behavior, culture, values, and the economic health of populations experiencing its effects. The environmental problems caused by social factors which negatively impacts the society need all efforts to solve, and as well as the consideration for environmental ethics, which will border on moral and ethical relationship of human beings to the environment. This paper provides an introduction on environmental sociology, and discusses its impact on humanity and solutions. Paul A. Adekunte | Matthew N. O. Sadiku | Sarhan M. Musa "Environmental Sociology: An Introduction" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-7 | Issue-6 , December 2023, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd61270.pdf Paper Url: https://www.ijtsrd.com/humanities-and-the-arts/sociology/61270/environmental-sociology-an-introduction/paul-a-adekunte
Saving the world from climate threats vs. dispelling climate myths and fearsFabius Maximus
A presentation at an invited seminar by Demetris Koutsoyiannis at WasserCluster Lunz on 20 April 2017. He is a Professor of Hydrology & Hydrosystems at the Dept. of Water Resources, School of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).
Four environmental researchers and analysts - Erle Ellis, Barry Brook, Linus Blomqvist, Ruth DeFries - offer a critique of an updated analysis of "planetary boundaries" for human activities offered in a new Science paper.
The Dynamics of Man's History and Economic Development: A Refocus on Ecologic...civejjour
Man’s history and developmental endeavour have been advancing alongside a trail of
ecological ramifications and climate change. Since prehistoric times, scientists have not
recorded an accelerated shift in ecology during any other epoch beside that of modern man
on the planet. The paper seeks to explore how man’s history and development affects ecology
and climate. It uses desk analysis to recollect data from global assessment reports and runs a
One paired Sample Means t-Test, 1 tailed, 8 df, at Pearson Correlation value 0.458 and 0.5
level. Findings show that, there is global climate change, seen in global warming trends; and
imbalance in ecological footprint, seen in depletion of air, water and land sinks. The t-Test
reveals significant net loss of global forest cover. The study also, found that at present,
processes of development generally tend to damage ecology. Therefore, the study
recommends a refocus to sustainable means of development.
THE DYNAMICS OF MAN'S HISTORY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: A REFOCUS ON ECOLOGIC...civejjour
Man’s history and developmental endeavour have been advancing alongside a trail of
ecological ramifications and climate change. Since prehistoric times, scientists have not
recorded an accelerated shift in ecology during any other epoch beside that of modern man
on the planet. The paper seeks to explore how man’s history and development affects ecology
and climate. It uses desk analysis to recollect data from global assessment reports and runs a
One paired Sample Means t-Test, 1 tailed, 8 df, at Pearson Correlation value 0.458 and 0.5
level. Findings show that, there is global climate change, seen in global warming trends; and
imbalance in ecological footprint, seen in depletion of air, water and land sinks. The t-Test
reveals significant net loss of global forest cover. The study also, found that at present,
processes of development generally tend to damage ecology. Therefore, the study
recommends a refocus to sustainable means of development.
Similar to Life support the political ecology of urban air (Paper) (20)
Elite Avenues: Flyovers, Freeways and the Politics of Urban MobilityStephen Graham
Development and planning elites across many of the burgeoning megacities of the global south still work powerfully to fetishise elevated highways or flyovers as part of their efforts at “worlding” their cities. In such a context, and given the neglect of such processes in recent urban and mobilities literatures, this article presents an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the urban and vertical politics of raised flyovers, freeways and expressways. It argues that such highways need to be seen as important elements within broader processes of three-dimensional social segregation and secession within and between cities which privilege the mobilities of the privileged. The paper falls into six sections. Following the introduction, the complex genealogies of flyover urban design are discussed. Discussion then moves to the vertical politics of flyovers in the west Bank and post-Apartheid South Africa; the elite imaginings surrounding flyover construction in Mumbai; the political struggles surrounding the ribbons of space beneath flyover systems; and the efforts to bury or re-appropriate the landscapes of raised flyovers.
Bunkering down the geography of elite residential basement development in londonStephen Graham
Much has been written about the “luxified skies” – “high-rise”, “super-prime” housing for the super-rich – that has been sprouting up across London. Thus far, less attention has been paid to what has been happening to the subterranean city. The “luxified skies” are highly visible reminders of elite “verticality” but, what we might term, “luxified troglodytism” is also an important aspect of London’s changing geometries of wealth, power and architecture. In this paper, we map out in detail the emerging subterranean geography of residential basement development across London since 2008. The very wealthy, it turns out, have been “bunkering down” across certain parts of London, to an extent hitherto little understood. Some 7,328 new residential basements underneath existing houses had been granted planning permission up to late-2019. Over 1,500 of them are of a size that their locations might best be thought of as marking out a distinct plutocratic “basement belt”.
Vertical : The city from satellites to bunkersStephen Graham
A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet
Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below.
Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He asks: why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth?
Vertical will make you look at the world around you anew: this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world.
Offering a critical response to the dominant vision of the smart city, this talk seeks to look beyond the seductive imagery and hype that surrounds emerging smart city paradigms. In their place, it explores arrange of critical perspectives to smart city planning that are emerging across the social sciences and activist communities, in various places across the world. These critiques centre, broadly, on ways in which smart city paradigms radically deepen urban surveillance ; the way they embed power into corporate urban operating systems; the way the glossy hype and marketing hides tendencies toward authoritarianism and centralized power ; and the way in which ‘smart’ city labels are used to camouflage the construction of highly elitist urban enclaves. The talk will finish by exploring efforts to mobilise digital media to more democratic and egalitarian urban vision.
Transcending the surface graham: The New Techno-Utopian Dreams (and Realities...Stephen Graham
A presentation about a range of utopian projects for moving about cities above and below the surface via tunnels. orbital travel, supersonic airliners and vertical take off and autonomous 'sky taxis'.
Subterranean urban politics: Insurgency, sanctuary, exploration and tourismStephen Graham
A presentation, drawing on my book 'Vertical', exploring the politics of the urban subterranean. The wide-ranging discussion explores the subterranean as a source of class threats and insurrections; as a sanctuary; as a space of exploration; and as a site for tourism.
Elite avenues: Flyovers, freeways and the politics of urban mobilityStephen Graham
Development and planning elites across many of the burgeoning megacities of the Global South still work powerfully to fetishise elevated highways or flyovers as part of their efforts at ‘worlding’ their cities. In such a context, and given the neglect of such processes in recent urban and mobilities literatures, this paper presents an international and interdis- ciplinary analysis of the urban and vertical politics of raised flyovers, freeways and express- ways. It argues that such highways need to be seen as important elements within broader processes of three-dimensional social segregation and secession within and between cities which privilege the mobilities of the privileged. The paper falls into six sections. Following the introduction, the complex genealogies of flyover urban design are discussed. Discussion then moves to the vertical politics of flyovers in the West Bank and post-Apartheid South Africa; the elite imaginings surrounding flyover construction in Mumbai; the political struggles surrounding the ribbons of space beneath flyover systems; and the efforts to bury or reappropriate the landscapes of raised flyovers.
Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fictionStephen Graham
Unerringly, across its whole history, urban science fiction has offered up imagined cities that operate about remarkably similar and highly verticalised visions. These are heavily dominated
by politics of class, resistance and revolution that are starkly organized around vertically stratified and vertically exaggerated urban spaces. From the early and definitive efforts
of H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang, through J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel 'High Rise', to many cyberpunk classics, this essay – the latest in a series on the vertical dimensions of cities –reflects on how vertical imaginaries in urban science fiction intersect with the politics and contestations of the fast-verticalising cities around the world. The essay has four parts. It begins by disentangling in detail the ways in which the sci-fi visions of Wells, Lang, Ballard and various cyberpunk authors were centrally constituted through vertical structures, landscapes, metaphors and allegories. The essay’s second part then then teases out the complex linkages between verticalised sci-fi imaginaries and material cityscapes that are actually constructed, lived and experienced. Stressing the impossibility of some clean and binary opposition between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ cities, the essay explores how verticalised
projects, material cities, sci-fi texts, imaginary futures, architectural schemes and urban theories mingle and resonate together in complex, unpredictable and important ways which do much to shape contemporary urban landscapes. The third section of the essay explores such connections through the cases of retro-futuristic urban megaprojects in the Gulf and forests of towers recently constructed in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The
essay’s final discussion draws on these cases to explore the possibilities that sci-fi imaginaries offer for contesting the rapid verticalisation of cities around the world.
Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science...Stephen Graham
Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature
Lucy Hewitt and Stephen Graham
This paper seeks to intersect two recent trends in urban research. First, it takes seriously the recognition that established traditions of research concerned with urban space have tended to privilege the horizontal extension of cities to the neglect of their vertical or volumetric extension. Second, the paper contributes to the resurgence of interest among social scientists in the validity of fiction – and especially speculative or science fiction – as a source of critical commentary and as a mode of knowledge that can exist in close reciprocity with non-fictional work. From these two starting points the paper develops a reading of the dialogue between the representations of vertical urban life that have featured in landmark works of 20th-century science fiction literature and key themes in contemporary urban analysis.
Water Wars in Mumbai
Stephen Graham, Renu Desai, and Colin McFarlane
Beyond the Pale
The Mumbai Mirror, January 8, 2010. A photograph shows a line of proud Mumbai police officers standing behind row upon row of what appear at first sight to be rusted machine guns (see fig. 1). But this is not one of the arms caches regularly unearthed to demonstrate the force’s effectiveness against the myriad terrorist networks that regularly target urban sites in contemporary India. Rather, the objects are water booster pumps, confiscated in a new campaign of dawn raids targeting “water theft” by slum dwellers in the Shivaji Nagar and
Govandi districts (see fig. 2 map below).
“Stealing Water to Earn a Few Bucks?” the headline reads. “Pay a Hefty
Price!” (Sathe 2010). The article details how the raids are being backed up by new legal moves to criminalize certain uses of water. Hundreds of people, arrested for installing and using the pumps, are to be prosecuted under draconian and nonbailable laws such as the Prevention of Damages to Public Property Act. All this activity is portrayed unproblematically as a heroic response to the threat that water theft in slums poses to the wider, formal, legitimate, and law-abiding city. “Pilferages, if not controlled,” writes the author, “could exhaust the potable water reserves before the next monsoon” (Sathe 2010).
Such statements tap into a mainstream discourse according to which recent poor monsoons have led to a major “water crisis” in Mumbai, necessitating radical, emergency measures to address widespread “water theft” or “water pilferage”— especially by the urban poor. What such discourses occlude, however, are the ways that current systems of urban water provision work to systematically dehydrate and profit from urban slum communities, while water wastage by the affluent and their preferred urban facilities goes unchecked.
Super-tall and Ultra-deep: The Cultural Politics of the ElevatorStephen Graham
Entire libraries can be filled with volumes exploring the cultures, politics and geo- graphies of the largely horizontal mobilities and transportation infrastructures that are intrinsic to urban modernity (highways, railways, subways, public transit and so on). And yet the recent ‘mobilities turn’ has almost completely neglected the cultural geographies and politics of vertical transportation within and between the buildings of vertically-structured cityscapes. Attempting to rectify this neglect, this article seeks, first, to bring elevator travel centrally into discussions about the cultural politics of urban space and, second, to connect elevator urbanism to the even more neglected worlds of elevator-based descent in ultra-deep mining. The article addresses, in turn: the historical emergence of elevator urbanism; the cultural significance of the eleva- tor as spectacle; the global ‘race’ in elevator speed; shifts towards the ‘splintering’ of elevator experiences; experiments with new mobility systems which blend elevators and automobiles; problems of vertical abandonment; and, finally, the neglected ver- tical politics of elevator-based ‘ultra-deep’ mining.
Vigar, Geoff, Stephen Graham, and Patsy Healey. "In search of the city in spa...Stephen Graham
Summary. This paper addresses the ways in which urban regions are represented in contemporary urban policies. In doing so, it critically examines how urban trends are reflected in diverse notions of ‘cityness’ in contemporary policy discourses about spatiality and territoriality. Through a detailed case study of the use and construction of the word ‘city’ in a range of urban governance contexts in Newcastle upon Tyne, this paper analyses the political work done by diverse representations and invocations of ‘cityness’ in contemporary urban governance. Such representations matter because the way in which contemporary cities are conceptualised influences policy formulations and policy outcomes. In addition, considerable emphasis is being placed in contemporary urban policy on ‘joining-up’, ‘integrating’ and co-ordinating governance efforts. How conceptions of the city are mobilised to do such integrating work provides insight into the challenge such ambitions present. The evidence from the case study suggests that the capacity of local actors to think about the processes of change in metropolitan regions, and to define the ways in which they can respond, is often limited, as they struggle to define what their ‘city’ actually might be these days. This tends to be to the detriment of collective attempts to maximise conditions for citizens and for investment.
Graham, Stephen. "Bridging urban digital divides? Urban polarisation and info...Stephen Graham
The societal diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICTs) remains starkly uneven at all scales. It is in the contemporary city that this unevenness becomes most visible. In cities, clusters and enclaves of ‘superconnected’ people, rms and institutions often rest cheek-by-jowel with large numbers of people with non-existent or rudimentary access to communications technologies. In such a context, this paper has two objectives, reected in its two parts. The rst part of the paper seeks to demonstrate that dominant trends in ICT develop- ment are currently helping to support new extremes of social and geographical unevenness within and between human settlements and cities, in both the North and the South. The paper’s second part aims to explore the prospect that such stark ‘urban digital divides’ might be ameliorated through progressive and innovative policy initiatives which treat cities and electronic technologies in parallel. It does this using a range of illustrative exemplars from a variety of contexts
Crang, Michael, Tracey Crosbie, and Stephen Graham. "Variable geometries of c...Stephen Graham
Summary. This paper proposes a new way of conceptualising urban ‘digital divides’. It focuses on the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) unevenly affect the pace of life within the urban environment. Based on a detailed case study of how ICTs are being used in an affluent and a marginalised neighbourhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, the paper suggests that urban digital divides need to be understood as more than uneven patterns of access. They emerge in this work as more than the presence or absence of specific technological artefacts. Rather, it is argued that different styles and speeds of technologically mediated life now work to define urban socio- spatial inequalities. The paper distinguishes between two such key styles and speeds. First, the paper argues that affluent and professional groups now use new media technologies pervasively and continuously as the ‘background’ infrastructure to sustain privileged and intensely distanciated, but time-stressed, lifestyles. Secondly, more marginalised neighbourhoods tend to be characterised by instrumental and episodic ICT usage patterns which are often collectively organised through strong neighbourhood ties. For the former, mediated networks help to orchestrate neighbourhood ties; for the latter, it is those neighbourhood ties that enable on-line access.
Graham, Stephen. "“Homeland” insecurities? Katrina and the politics of “secur...Stephen Graham
This intervention explores the paradox that although the Bush administration has repeatedly stressed the purported insecurity of U.S. urbanites to “terroristic” threats since 9/11, it has simul- taneously undermined the preparedness and resilience of U.S. cities in the face of catastrophic weather and seismic events. Arguing that Katrina needs to be seen as an event that unerringly exposes the politics of urban security in post-9/11 U.S. cities, the piece explores the relationships between neoconservative, antiurban ideology; the “homeland security” drive; and climate change, catastrophic weather events, and oil geopolitics.
Graham, Stephen, and Lucy Hewitt. "Getting off the ground On the politics of ...Stephen Graham
This article contends that critical urban research is characterized by horizontalism. It argues that the swathe of recent urban writings have neglected the vertical qualities of contemporary urbanization. The article’s introductory section elaborates this argument in detail. The paper then elucidates three areas where vertically oriented research is emerging. These encompass: the links between Google Earth and urbanism; the connections between social secession and ascension through buildings, walkways and personalized air travel; and the links between verticalized surveillance and urban burrowing.
Graham, Stephen "Software-sorted geographies." Progress in Human Geography 29...Stephen Graham
Abstract: This paper explores the central role of computerized code in shaping the social and geographical politics of inequality in advanced societies. The central argument is that, while such processes are necessarily multifaceted, multiscaled, complex and ambivalent, a great variety of ‘software-sorting’ techniques is now being widely applied in efforts to try to separate privileged and marginalized groups and places across a wide range of sectors and domains. This paper’s central demonstration is that the overwhelming bulk of software-sorting applications is closely associated with broader transformations from Keynesian to neoliberal service regimes. To illustrate such processes of software-sorting, the paper analyses recent research addressing three examples of software-sorting in practice. These address physical and electronic mobility systems, online geographical information systems (GIS), and face-recognition closed circuit television (CCTV) systems covering city streets. The paper finishes by identifying theoretical, research and policy implications of the diffusion of software-sorted geographies within which computerized code continually orchestrates inequalities through technological systems embedded within urban environments.
Graham, Stephen. "The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptuali...Stephen Graham
Abstract: This article critically explores how the relations between information technologies and space and place are being conceptualized in a broad swathe of recent writings and discourses on the geographies of `cyberspace' and information technologies. After analysing the powerful role of spatial and territorial metaphors in anchoring current discourses about information tech- nologies and society, the article goes on to identify three broad, dominating perspectives. These I label the perspective of `substitution and transcendence' (dominated by technological Utopian- ists), the `co-evolution' perspective (drawing from political economy and cultural studies) and the `recombination' perspective (derived from recent work in actor-network theory). The discussion turns to each in turn, extracting the geographical dimensions and implications of each. The article concludes by considering the implications of the discussion for spatial treatments of society± technology relations and for broader debates about the nature of space and place.
Graham, Stephen. "War and the city." New Left Review 44 (2007): 121. APA Stephen Graham
Western military strategy was long premised on the avoidance of urban combat, with air strikes the preferred method of subduing large conurbations. Cities were seen as targets, not battlefields. But today, the cityscapes of the global South have emerged as paradigmatic conflict zones. Since the end of the Cold War, America’s militarized thrust into the Middle East and Central Eurasia has focused Pentagon planners’ attention on the burgeoning Arab and Third World cities that are now deemed de facto sites of current and future warfare for us forces. While the ‘revolution in military affairs’ emphasized overhead dominance, the losing battle for the streets of Iraq has sharpened the Pentagon’s focus on battles within the micro-geographies of slums, favelas, industrial districts and casbahs, as well as on globe-spanning stealth and surveillance technologies.....
"Understanding the Carbon Cycle: Processes, Human Impacts, and Strategies for...MMariSelvam4
The carbon cycle is a critical component of Earth's environmental system, governing the movement and transformation of carbon through various reservoirs, including the atmosphere, oceans, soil, and living organisms. This complex cycle involves several key processes such as photosynthesis, respiration, decomposition, and carbon sequestration, each contributing to the regulation of carbon levels on the planet.
Human activities, particularly fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, have significantly altered the natural carbon cycle, leading to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and driving climate change. Understanding the intricacies of the carbon cycle is essential for assessing the impacts of these changes and developing effective mitigation strategies.
By studying the carbon cycle, scientists can identify carbon sources and sinks, measure carbon fluxes, and predict future trends. This knowledge is crucial for crafting policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions, enhancing carbon storage, and promoting sustainable practices. The carbon cycle's interplay with climate systems, ecosystems, and human activities underscores its importance in maintaining a stable and healthy planet.
In-depth exploration of the carbon cycle reveals the delicate balance required to sustain life and the urgent need to address anthropogenic influences. Through research, education, and policy, we can work towards restoring equilibrium in the carbon cycle and ensuring a sustainable future for generations to come.
Natural farming @ Dr. Siddhartha S. Jena.pptxsidjena70
A brief about organic farming/ Natural farming/ Zero budget natural farming/ Subash Palekar Natural farming which keeps us and environment safe and healthy. Next gen Agricultural practices of chemical free farming.
Characterization and the Kinetics of drying at the drying oven and with micro...Open Access Research Paper
The objective of this work is to contribute to valorization de Nephelium lappaceum by the characterization of kinetics of drying of seeds of Nephelium lappaceum. The seeds were dehydrated until a constant mass respectively in a drying oven and a microwawe oven. The temperatures and the powers of drying are respectively: 50, 60 and 70°C and 140, 280 and 420 W. The results show that the curves of drying of seeds of Nephelium lappaceum do not present a phase of constant kinetics. The coefficients of diffusion vary between 2.09.10-8 to 2.98. 10-8m-2/s in the interval of 50°C at 70°C and between 4.83×10-07 at 9.04×10-07 m-8/s for the powers going of 140 W with 420 W the relation between Arrhenius and a value of energy of activation of 16.49 kJ. mol-1 expressed the effect of the temperature on effective diffusivity.
Willie Nelson Net Worth: A Journey Through Music, Movies, and Business Venturesgreendigital
Willie Nelson is a name that resonates within the world of music and entertainment. Known for his unique voice, and masterful guitar skills. and an extraordinary career spanning several decades. Nelson has become a legend in the country music scene. But, his influence extends far beyond the realm of music. with ventures in acting, writing, activism, and business. This comprehensive article delves into Willie Nelson net worth. exploring the various facets of his career that have contributed to his large fortune.
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Introduction
Willie Nelson net worth is a testament to his enduring influence and success in many fields. Born on April 29, 1933, in Abbott, Texas. Nelson's journey from a humble beginning to becoming one of the most iconic figures in American music is nothing short of inspirational. His net worth, which estimated to be around $25 million as of 2024. reflects a career that is as diverse as it is prolific.
Early Life and Musical Beginnings
Humble Origins
Willie Hugh Nelson was born during the Great Depression. a time of significant economic hardship in the United States. Raised by his grandparents. Nelson found solace and inspiration in music from an early age. His grandmother taught him to play the guitar. setting the stage for what would become an illustrious career.
First Steps in Music
Nelson's initial foray into the music industry was fraught with challenges. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue his dreams, but success did not come . Working as a songwriter, Nelson penned hits for other artists. which helped him gain a foothold in the competitive music scene. His songwriting skills contributed to his early earnings. laying the foundation for his net worth.
Rise to Stardom
Breakthrough Albums
The 1970s marked a turning point in Willie Nelson's career. His albums "Shotgun Willie" (1973), "Red Headed Stranger" (1975). and "Stardust" (1978) received critical acclaim and commercial success. These albums not only solidified his position in the country music genre. but also introduced his music to a broader audience. The success of these albums played a crucial role in boosting Willie Nelson net worth.
Iconic Songs
Willie Nelson net worth is also attributed to his extensive catalog of hit songs. Tracks like "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," "On the Road Again," and "Always on My Mind" have become timeless classics. These songs have not only earned Nelson large royalties but have also ensured his continued relevance in the music industry.
Acting and Film Career
Hollywood Ventures
In addition to his music career, Willie Nelson has also made a mark in Hollywood. His distinctive personality and on-screen presence have landed him roles in several films and television shows. Notable appearances include roles in "The Electric Horseman" (1979), "Honeysuckle Rose" (1980), and "Barbarosa" (1982). These acting gigs have added a significant amount to Willie Nelson net worth.
Television Appearances
Nelson's char
WRI’s brand new “Food Service Playbook for Promoting Sustainable Food Choices” gives food service operators the very latest strategies for creating dining environments that empower consumers to choose sustainable, plant-rich dishes. This research builds off our first guide for food service, now with industry experience and insights from nearly 350 academic trials.
Artificial Reefs by Kuddle Life Foundation - May 2024punit537210
Situated in Pondicherry, India, Kuddle Life Foundation is a charitable, non-profit and non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to improving the living standards of coastal communities and simultaneously placing a strong emphasis on the protection of marine ecosystems.
One of the key areas we work in is Artificial Reefs. This presentation captures our journey so far and our learnings. We hope you get as excited about marine conservation and artificial reefs as we are.
Please visit our website: https://kuddlelife.org
Our Instagram channel:
@kuddlelifefoundation
Our Linkedin Page:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/kuddlelifefoundation/
and write to us if you have any questions:
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Life support the political ecology of urban air (Paper)
1. 1
Life-Support: The Political Ecology of Urban Air
Figures and Captions are At the End of the Paper
Paper submitted to Progress in Human Geography
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University
2. 2
Abstract
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.
Keywords: urban air
Political ecology
4. 4
A: Introduction: Anthropogenic Atmospheres and the “Defencelessness of Breathing”
“At first we feel nothing, we are insensitive, 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-conditioning system that makes our life possible.” Bruno Latour (2005; 104)
Humans, increasingly, manufacturer their own air. For a species which expires without air in two or three minutes – what Elias Canetti (1987; 930
has called “defenselessness of breathing” -- this anthropogenic manufacture of air is of incalculable importance. Inescapably, ”air constitutes an
implicit condition of existence” (Sloterdijk, 2009).
The process of machinic manufacture happens in a variety of related ways. On a planetary scale, the earth’s atmospheric temperature and
composition is now so radically different from what it was a few centuries ago that geologists are now pushing for the contemporary period to
carry an appropriately anthropomorphic moniker – the ‘Anthropocene’ – rather than the previous ‘Holocene ‘ (the period since the retreat of the
5. 5
ice sheets around 12, 000 years ago -- see Boschman, 2014). Global climate change is a product of three centuries of rampant urban-industrial
growth: between 70% and 80% of all greenhouse gasses now emanate from the world’s urban areas (Hodson and Marvin, 2010).
In and around the three-dimensional aerial environments within and above these urban regions, this manufacture of air reaches even greater levels
of intensity. Here, giant, warmed-up domes or ‘heat islands’, warmed by the city’s release of energy, the extra-high concentration of greenhouse
gases (and other pollutants) that linger above cities, and the tendency of concrete and asphalt to heavily absorb the sun’s heat, are systematically
filled with complex ‘cocktails’ of pollutants from all the energy-intensive activities that concentrate in and around cities: power generation; industry;
oil-based transportation, building use and so on. As urbanisation intensifies and spreads, so a wide range of global health organisations are asserting
that these domes filled with warmed-up cocktails of gases are becoming one of humanity’s greatest killers (see World Health Organization, 2014;
OECD, 2014).
Startlingly, however, the politics and geographies of bad or lethal air in cities remain peripheral to the huge growth of political-ecological work on
the social and technological productions of nature in urban environments that has in other ways been do productive in human geography and
critical urbanism over the past two decades (see Heynen et al, 2006a). This body of work, linked closely to wider post-humanist and materialist
shifts in social theory and philosophy (Bennett, 2010), has successfully challenged conventional conceptions of the urban, and of the society/Nature
binary, by positing urban processes as complex multi-scaled metabolisms fundamentally integrating social, organic, ‘natural’ and technological agents
6. 6
into strung-out, ‘cyborgian’, ‘socioecological’ or ‘technonatural’ complexes, assemblages, or hybrids (with the latter concepts and terms vary
between different strands of theorisation) (see Swyngedouw, 2006).
Resulting studies of such urban metabolisations of nature have successfully addressed, amongst other themes, water and sanitation (Kaika, 2005),
the politics of food (Heynen, 2006), the production of green space (Heynen, et al, 2006b), the violent political ecologies of oil and other resources
(Peluso and Watts, 2001), or the collapse of urban infrastructures (Graham, 2009)(for a recent review, see Heynen, 2013).
It is startling, however, that despite the wider public discourses of air-emergency in the world’s cities, beyond a few initial analyses, the political
ecology of urban air remains underdeveloped. ‘Technical’, depoliticised, medicalised, physical-geographic and public health policy discourses still
overwhelmingly dominate the field. “Urban political ecology research has so far been focused on natural resources for consumption, production,
and recreation, rather than on environmental pollution” (Véron, 2006; 2094). Raymond Bryant’s diagnoses over fifteen years ago that “the existing
literature [on changing air quality] is largely devoid of political analysis'', a problem which inevitably works to obfuscate the ways in which ``unequal
power relations are [] `inscribed' in the air(1998; 89), '' retain power today. (Although it must be noted that more progress has been made
exposing the environmental injustices and epidemiologies of air pollution-related ill-health in cities -- see Corburn et al, 2004; Morello-Frosch et
al, 2001; Pearce et al, 2006).
7. 7
A few innovative papers, motivated by this wider neglect, have made useful starts. Michael Buzzelli (2008) developed a political-ecological
discussion of challenges of multi-scaled nature of air pollution for air pollution monitoring in Vancouver. Janice Harper (2010) blended political-
ecological theory with medical anthropological ideas to presented a searing ethnography of the stark air pollution and asthma crises in Houston.
And Réne Véron’s (2006) built an innovative analysis exploring the growing power of elites’ bourgeois-environmentalist ideas emphasising the
beautification of Delhi as a ‘world city‘ in shaping pollution monitoring in the city. Ostensible efforts by governmental elites to ‘clean-up’ urban air
in Delhi, Véron shows, thus amount to a deeply revanchist programme to remove the poor, along with their vehicles and informal communities,
which they deem not to befit to ‘purified‘ environments of this sanitised urban vision.
Such analyses, however, remain sporadic and occasional; the contrast with the burgeoning literatures on the political-ecologies of urban water is
sharp. Erik Swyngedouw’ and Nik Heynen’s emphasis over a decade ago on major metropolitan regions as socio-natural and technonatural
complexes within multiscaled political-ecologies through which dangerous and bad air is produced and shifted has yet to shifty such processes to
the centre of critical-geographic analysis. “The cars burning fuels from distant oil-deposits and pumping CO2 into the air, affecting people, forests,
climates, and geopolitical conditions 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, national and global—but depressingly uneven geographically—
socioecological processes.” (2003; 899)
8. 8
More broadly, whilst the innovative work of German Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (2005; 2009) on the histories of deadly air in warfare, climate
change and geoengineering is having major influence, environmental anthropologist Tim Choy asserts that air still remains peripheral to social
theorisation. “Air matters too little in social theory,” he writes. “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 left to drift […] neither theorized nor examined, taken simply as solidity’s lack. There seems at first to be no
reason not to let it” (Choy, 2010, 9-11)
Such a neglect seems especially paradoxical given wider recent shifts in the social theorisation of urbanism and urbanisation towards an emphasis on
a Lefebvrian process of planetary urbanisation (Brenner, 2013); a preoccupation with the urban dimensions of global climate change and the
unsurprisingly huge contribution of urban-industrial centres to greenhouse gas emissions (Hodgson and Marvin, 2010); a growing recognition of the
volumetric and vertical aspects of politics and geopolitics (Elden, 2013); and the wider cultural geographies, affective atmospheres and histories of
urban air (Anderson and Holden, 2008; Martin, 2011; Adey, 2013).
Much work thus remains to be done to explicate the political ecologies and politics of the materiality of urban air in the context of rapid
urbanization and global climate change. Such a project needs to work to make explicit the systematic anythropogenic and machinic
manufacture and material conditioning of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ air, through design, technoscience, capitalist industrialism, militarism, warfare,
commodification, consumerism, and so forth. In a context of planetary urbanisation, unprecedented pollution and public health crises, rising
social inequalities and rapid anthropogenic climate change, air, in other words, needs to be wrenched fully finally and fully from any lingering
9. 9
post-Enlightenment categories of its givenness as a ‘public’ good within a ‘Nature” that is external to the socio-technical worlds and
processes of urban life. As Bruno Latour has emphasised so elegantly, Solterdijk’s work hammers home the enormous stakes which surround
the essential technopolitics of a species inhabiting environments of increasingly manufactured and ‘conditioned’ air. “This is Sloterdijk’s
explicitness, “ he writes:
”You are on life support, it’s fragile, it’s technical, it’s public, it’s political, it could break down—it is breaking down—it’s being fixed, you are not
too confident of those who fix it. Our current condition merely relies on our more explicit understanding that this tentative technological
system, this “life support,” entails the whole planet—even its atmosphere.” (2005; 104).
With such an apparent gap between global public heath crises, and analytical neglect, this unusually broad review paper seeks to help shift the
politics and political-ecological materialities of urban air from the margins to the centre of critical urban social science. To achieve this, it
undertakes an international and multi-scaled review of the multiple dimensions of the politics of contemporary urban air, discussions of which tend
conventionally to be separated within the highly ‘siloed’ discourses of separated academic and policy communities. Through an interdisciplinary
synthesis, the paper’s aim is to blend insights from recent research in human geography, urban studies, urban design. architecture, environmental
sociology, climatology, social policy, public heath, epidemiology, political theory and philosophy around a series of key, cross-cutting thematic
vignettes. The aim here, then, to use such a synthesis to add momentum to an already discernible ‘turn’ towards the critical social scientific and
10. 10
architectural analysis of air (see Adey, 2-13, 2014; Gissen, 2013) and to further the incorporation of urban air (and its politics) into urban social
theory.
Accordingly, what follows is structured around nine suggested themes, to which, I feel, a political ecology of urban air should urgently attend.
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.
A: Heat Islands and Killer Heat Waves
“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, between 1979 and 2003, heat exposure has caused more than the number
of mortalities resulting from hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined.” (NASA, 2010).
Turning to our first vignette, the well-known “urban heat island” effect already mentioned (see Lee, 1984; Gartland, 2010) means that the raised
ambient air temperature at the core of large urban areas is usually at their highest during clear, still nights, reaching temperatures which are
between 3 and 10oC higher than that in surrounding areas (Figure 1). Such effects are important contributors to global warming as a whole.
Although their precise contribution remains controversial amongst Climatologists, the best recent evidence suggests that the extra heat given off by
11. 11
urban areas has contributed something between 15% and 21% of global warming as a whole over the past 150 years (as opposed to greenhouse
gas emissions and other changes)(Zeke Hausfather and Menne, 2013).
Figure 1 here
Recent research using remote sensing shows that urban heat islands can have even greater effects than even recent thought suggests: one major
study in the United States in 2010 showed that summer temperature in the main cities on the North east – Boston, New York, Philadelphia and
Washington DC -- were an average of 7 °C to 9 °C (13°F to 16 °F) warmer than surrounding rural areas over a three year period. (NASA, 2010).
As well as ameliorating cold winters, urban heat islands can dramatically accentuate the lethal effects of hot summers within a context of a warming
planetary climate. Emergencies such as the Chicago heatwave in 1995 and the European heat wave of 2003 (which killed around 70,000 largely
elderly people) have dramatically revealed the ways in which systematic 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 hospitalization for multiple diseases,
including cardiovascular disease, ischemic heart disease, ischemic stroke, respiratory disease, pneumonia, dehydration, 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; 1053).
12. 12
Current estimates suggesting that average planetary temperatures rose between 0.5°C to 1.3 °C between 1951 and 2000 due to anthropogenic
greenhouse gas emissions. These temperatures, moreover, will inevitably rise further by the end of the century by between 1.7 C and 4.8 C
(depending on the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced)(Johnson, 2013). Given that, by 2100, the UN estimates that the
world’s population will be between 11 billion and 15 billion, and that fully 65%-85% of that population will inhabit heat-island cities, primarily in
tropical or semitropical locations, the future threat if major urban heat emergencies seems an especially daunting one.
Worrying precedents already exist. In the 1995 heat wave in Chicago , after a forty-eight hours period of daytime temperatures between 41-43 C,
those without air conditioning, living near the black, bitumined roofs of the city’s notorious public housing ‘projects’ on the South Side, quite literally
baked. Many were too worried about the possibilities of crime to open their windows. Many who did have air con could not afford to turn it on
because of high electricity costs (power outages were also a major problem). By Friday, July 14, as Eric Klinenberg (2002a) recounts:
“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 patients. Some ambulance crews drove around the city for miles looking
for an open bed. Hundreds of victims 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.” (see Klinenberg, 2002b).
13. 13
By the end of the week 739 people had died because of the extreme heat (especially the lack of cooling at night). The pattern mapped perfectly on
to the geography of poverty: most victims were old, poor, isolated and male– they died alone. Elderly African-American men were statistically the
most likely to die (Klinenberg, 2002a).
The heat catastrophe across Europe in 2003, which prematurely killed around 70,000 people, similarly overly affected the old, the ill and the lonely
living isolated lives in major cities like Paris (where 4,800 such people, labeled the ‘Forgotten’ in French media, lost their lives)(NASA, 2010). As in
Chicago, the most lethal spaces were marginal, poor quality apartments high up in the tenements beneath the dark, baking slate and bitumen of
roofs. “Many of these forgotten victims lived in chambers de bonne,” Richard Keller (2013; 302) writes, “the former domestic servants’ quarters
under the roofs of many of Paris’s buildings that are a legacy of Prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s reconstruction of the city in the nineteenth
century”.
Indeed, the deaths of the isolated, poor and old helped to expose the Janus-faced vertical architectures and geographies of Paris: a sumptuous and
burnished street-level face for the bourgeoisie hiding an invisible, decrepit (and dangerous) world of attic-living for the poor. Richard Keller (2013;
302) explored the personal residences of the isolated and old people who died in the heat wave (many of which were buried, like victims of the
Chicago heatwave, in unattended funerals). Entering the street-level front door of the apparently wealthy East side Haussmannian block where one
of the heat-wave’s victims lived, he discovered that “it is actually two buildings in one. A marble-lined entryway gives access to the building
concierge’s apartment, the elevator, a wide stair- case leading to the main building’s apartments, and the courtyard.”
14. 14
The rear-side of the block, Keller (2013; 307) found, by contrast, was “accessible only by a serpentine and decrepit service staircase. This side of
the building houses the chambres de bonne, seven or eight such apartments with a common toilet and sink at one end of the hall.” These
apartments, hidden away high up from view, are raised up to the sun, were the killing zones in Paris’ 2003 heatwave. They illustrated profoundly
how heightening social inequalities, embodied through the vertical complexities of physical urban form, can dramatically affect the vulnerabilities of
marginalised populations during urban heat emergencies.
A: Toxic Domes
“Air...from Johannesburg to Tehran, to Delhi to Jakarta, isn’t about aesthetics, or even possible climate change at some point in the
future: it’s about life and death now” (Doyle and Risely, 2008; 246).
As well as unlivable heat – and this is our second vignette --processes of urban-industrialisation systematically manufacture whole environments
where the ambient air is a basically toxic environments which kill millions of people a year. Le Corbusier (1967) called the air of industrial cities,
“devil’s air” – and for good reason. The statistics here are even more startling than those surrounding urban heart emergencies: urban air is killing
urbanites at alarming rates.
15. 15
Iconic episodes show that this is not new, of course. Indeed, deadly air pollution, rather than some simple ‘externality,’ has long been constitutive of
modern urban-industrialism and its machinic landscapes (Horvarth, 1974; Véron, 2006; 2096). In 1952, in one iconic example, 13,000 people died
in a three-month smog episode in London.
Recent studies, however, estimate that global death rates from air pollution are rising exponentially: Toxic air now provides the world’s biggest
public health crisis. In 2014, following new evidence that the stresses of polluted air are responsible for many deaths through strokes and heart
diseases amongst physiologically-stressed urbanites, the World Health Organization estimated that fully 7 million people were killed by air pollution
globally in 2012. “The risks from air pollution are now far greater than previously thought or understood, particularly for heart disease and strokes,”
argued Dr Maria Neira, Director of WHO’s Department for Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health. “Few risks have a
greater impact on global health today than air pollution; the evidence signals the need for concerted action to clean up the air we all breathe.”
(WHO, 2014). 4.3 million of the estimated deaths these were due to indoor air pollution (mainly from lit stoves); 3.7 million were due to bad
external air. When analysis takes into account the secondary deaths through cardio-vascular and pulmonary mortalities (especially emphysema and
chronic bronchitis), fully one in eight of all human deaths was caused by bad air inside and outside (WHO, 2014)..
Children, the elderly, the poor
and those with respiratory and heart problems are dramatically over-represented in this annual figure.
16. 16
In China alone, air pollution, largely from the cars and industries within cities , is estimated to kill over 1.2 million people prematurely per year. (The
combination of mass automobilisation, extreme reliance on coal and rapid industrialization make Chinese City’s the most polluted in the
world)(Environmental Technology, 2013).
In India, meanwhile, a conservative estimate suggest that 620,000 people die prematurely each year through the effects of urban air pollution
(Economic Times, 2013). This figure is growing rapidly as the country urbanises and automobilises at very fast rates. Of 180 Indian cities monitored
for Sulphur Dioxide, Nitrogen Dioxide and suspended particle natter only two—Malappuram and Pattanamthitta in Kerala—met the World health
Organization’s rather generous criteria of ‘acceptable’ pollution in 2012.
Atmospheric dust thrown up by diesel engines, coal-burning power stations and industry --- ‘particulate matter’ – is the single biggest killer within
the toxic domes above cities: this literally asphyxiates urbanites through cancers, lung disease and asthma. "By 2050, there could be 3.6 million
premature deaths a year from exposure to particulate matter, most of them in China and India," a recent report by the OECD (2014) estimates.
Chilling epidemiological records and surprises are continually emerging here: in November 2013 an eight year old girl living adjacent to one of
Beijing’s massive flyovers became the youngest person ever to be diagnosed with lung cancer (Duggan, 2013; for wider research on air pollution
and asthma crises in urban neighbourhoods, see Corburn, et al, 2006).
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Toxic urban atmospheres are especially lethal in cities that are hemmed in my mountains or other natural features; where concentrations of
particularly dirty polluters are most intense; and during stable anticyclonic episodes where air fails to rise or get blown way and lingers for days and
even weeks. It is now common for health authorities in major cities – Beijing, Lagos, Santiago, Mexico City, Kathmandu, Sa ̃o Paulo, Cairo, Jakarta,
Athens are only some of the most notorious examples – to declare states of emergency during such situations. Millions of vehicles are forced off
the roads; the most-polluting industries are shut down; populations, especially the most vulnerable, are urged to stay indoors until the smog clears.
Architect Albert Pope, invoking Peter Sloterdijk’s (2009) work on the weaponisation of air through lethal gas attacks in war and terrorism, wonders
if such crises, in effect, work as what Sloterdijk calls ‘airquakes’. “Can a set of ontological rights — such as breathing — actually challenge or even
displace economic hegemony?” he asks. To him, the unbearable urban air within many Chinese cities works to “brings the elements of our life-
world out of a background of neglect and foregrounds them as the ontological preconditions of human existence.”
A: Pollution Paradoxes
“Smouldering away, the megacity’s atmospheres lend a definite aura” (Adey, 2103; 2).
Third, toxic urban air works to interrupt the efforts of city agencies to entrepreneurially brand and market their cities as blue-skied and fragrant-
aired destinations for tourists, conferences, film locations, investment flows and, above all, sporting mega-events.
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The authoritarian regime in Beijing – a city that pumps out more particulate matter than Portugal (Adey, 2103; 7) and adds 400,000 cars to its
roads every year -- worked especially hard to re-engineer the city’s air for the 2008 Olympics by forcing traffic off the road and closing factories.
Whilst the population’s health dramatically improved, the reversion to previous levels of transport, energy generation and industrial production
immediately after the Games reintroduced the downward spiral.
Indeed, by the end of 2013, the murderous pollution in Beijing and other big Chinese cities meant that airline pilots were being instructed on how
to land in smog. The crisis was so bad that the country’s official media was reduced to releasing bizarre platitudes that the pollution meant that the
people’s “knowledge of meteorology, geography, physics, chemistry and history [had] progressed.” Stranger still, blankets of killer smog were
invoked as a geopolitical, defensive shield against the prying weapons of unknown enemies. “Smog may affect people’s health and daily lives,” the
announcer admitted. “But on the battlefield it can serve as a defensive advantage in military operations.” (Kalman, 2013).
Pollution paradoxes can sometimes interrupt apparently inexorable logics of urban warming. In a particularly prolonged smog event in February
2014, Chinese scientists warned that the smog blanketing the Beijing region was becoming so bad that its effects were starting to resemble those of
nuclear winters, creating a city almost “uninhabitable for human beings”. Densities of suspended particles hit concentrations over 20 times
maximum limits recommended by the World Health Organization. Photosynthesis rates in agricultural crops in the greenhouse-based systems
within Beijing’s hinterland was halved. Architectures to boost food production for teeming cities at the local, ground-level scale will always prove to
be no match for the human manufacture of toxic, and increasingly opaque, urban atmospheres (Kalman, 2014).
19. 19
In Hong Kong, meanwhile, in the year 2000, a priority of economic development authorities was to tempt the Walt Disney Corporation to build a
theme park there. They were nearly unsuccessful because the Corporation felt that the city’s notoriously bad winter air pollution “did not mesh
particularly well with the family image that Disney so prided itself on cultivating.” (Choy, 2010; 6). (Deep ironies lurk here of course: Los Angeles,
the location of Disney’s headquarters, has suffered episodes of catastrophic smog for decades).
Echoing the complex simulations of pollution-free urbanism choreographed 2000 miles further North in Beijing, tourist managers in Hong Kong
now routinely erect blue-skied panoramas next to the iconic city view points when pollution episodes obscure the skyline and harbour with what
the International Business Times called a “steamy sauna of humidity and noxious air” (FlorCruz, 2013)(see Figure 2).
Figure 2 here
Indeed, Urban tourism economies are especially vulnerable to toxic urban air. Urban pollution crises in China in late 2013 saw domestic and
international visitor numbers to iconic sites such as Beijing’s Forbidden City drop by 75%. Chinese insurance companies even introduced travel
insurance packages covering smog events to try and bolster bookings (Coldwell, 2014).
But immersion in megacity air leads to more than health hazards, environmental injustice and problems for place marketers and tourists. As in the
smoke-filled industrial cities of nineteenth century Europe, these airs also inevitably shape the atmospheric, aesthetic and affective experiences of
place. These relationships, too, are often paradoxical: as Turner found when painting the startling sunsets generated by major global volcanic events
20. 20
in the 1880s, toxic air can generate its own sublime urban beauty.
Figure 3 here
In cities like Shanghai (Figure 3), the combination of rising vertical towers and the worsening state of city air creates its own aesthetic connection:
the view of the smog-filled lower atmospheres from tower residents above. Giuditata Vendrame, an Italian who lived for 11 months on the 17th
floor of a gleaming new tower in central Shanghai, recalls that the thickening haze of the city’s polluted air “often imbue[d] the city with a particular
sense of lightness, suspension and fragility.” The foggy air, in turn, softened her view of the city’s burgeoning forest of concrete, skyscraping towers.
“The city gains visual and architectural qualities,” 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 pollution.” (Vendrame, 2012).
A: Downwind
Fourth, the uneven distribution of bad air works horizontally, too. Less urbanised areas downwind of major metropolitan formations breathe the
filth of the city they may never visit. Such downwind vulnerabilities are especially lethal after chemical spills (as at Bhopal in 1984 which has killed up
to 16,000 people) or when they become radioactive due to atmospheric nuclear testing or nuclear catastrophies like those at Chernobyl and
21. 21
Fukushima. Less often, it is cities that are downwind from bad air generated by rural conflagrations: “Singapore frequently complains of the extreme
haze caused by Sumatran forest fires in Indonesia.” (Adey, 2103; 10).
At a planetary scale, the relative (although sometimes chimerical) cleaning-up of the airscapes above European, Japanese or North American cities
has been achieved partly through a massive geoeconomic shift across the horizontal terrain of the Earth’s surface: the huge and filthy extractive and
manufacturing complexes that sustain these cities is now strung out across China, East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and even Australia.
A major report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013 concluded that such wholesale offshoring between the West and East
Asia was the key reason that global emissions of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases increased twice as fast between 2000 and 2010
as they did during the previous three decades. This was because of the huge growth of manufacturing capacity powered by electricity generated
from dirty coal-burning power stations. “A growing share of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in developing countries,” the report
concluded, “is released in the production of goods and services exported, notably from upper-middle-income countries to high-income countries.”
(cited in Goldenberg, 2014).
The circulations of the global atmosphere, however, means that even horizontal outsourcing and offspring of bad air across transcontinental
horizontal scales fails to offer a complete insulation from bad-air: a recent study finds that 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 (Walker, 2014).
22. 22
A: Airy Refuges, Human Sinks
“One can […] discern a political-economic geography of air” (Choy, 2010; 26)
Fifth, in all cities, the impacts of these toxic and warmed-up aerial domes is distributed extremely unevenly and unjustly: whilst atmospheric pollution
can be a great leveler in terms of wealth and class, generally, wealthy and elite groups are able to insulate themselves from its effects more
effectively than are poor or marginalised ones. Here a three-dimensional cat and mouse game of environmental injustice is wrought out as systems
of linked, ‘capsular’ spaces such as condominiums and penthouses, malls, office complexes and upmarket cars are constructed which offer air-
conditioning (whilst pumping their heat straight to hose immediately outside)(see De Cauter, 2005). Cars, often flitting across the cityscape on
raised flyovers, dump their heat, noise and carcinogens straight onto the relatively impoverished communities that such structures bisect. Adjacent
communities have been shown to have dramatically higher death-rates due to asthma and other pollution-related diseases than those further away
from the highways. “Residential proximity to freeways is associated with uncontrolled asthma.” (Huynh et al, 2012).
The damaging impacts of auto exhaust emissions were one of the motivations of modernist architects like Le Corbusier to advocate the
destruction of traditional streets and the mass housing of urban populations into raised towers (see Gissen, 2013; 3). Cars, meanwhile, would
traverse the city on freeways surrounded by buffer zones of pollution-absorbing greenery. These days, however, mass modernist housing
programmes are mostly in abeyance – with occasional exceptions such as Singapore. The colonization of (air-conditioned) vertical space is now
23. 23
largely an elite program – a three-dimensional rising up of the powerful and wealthy bound up with the neoliberal and revanchist reengineering of
entire cityscapes largely for their needs. As elites in many cities literally rise up into gated, air-conditioned, vertical communities and tall, climate-
controlled workplace towers, so they work to escape both the din of urban life and the pressing heat and pollution of the hotter urban surface.
Such vertical geographies of environmental injustice tend to be exaggerated where cities are built on mountainous terrain. Ascending up the
proliferating skyscrapers in the world’s most vertical city – Hong Kong -- anthropologist, Tim Choy (2010; 29), is struck that that “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”.
Elite expatriates, for example, can seek refuge from bad air, noise, heat and humidity by colonizing what he calls Hong Kong’s “airy refuges” -- in
skyscraper penthouses located in the topographic heights of the Peak or Mid-Levels. Just above the teeming street, meanwhile, covered, extending,
air conditioned escalator systems snake to connect archipelagoes of elite spaces of consumption, work and leisure. “Much of Hong Kong seems
designed to get off the ground—into the air, and out of it” (ibid.) These dynamics add to and layer over the long-standing traditions of elites to
inhabit exurban or mountainous locations to escape the worst of the environmental toxins, pollutions and temperatures within the toxic domes
above cities. (Classic urban geography also dictates that often such processes of elite exurbanisation were often orchestrated upwind of the main
metropolitan centre).
24. 24
Hong Kong offers a starling system of vertically-raised walkways snaking between the huge, raised podium structures at the bases of upmarket
hotels, residential blocks and malls and corporate enclaves (Figure 4). Such systems can literally allow those who have access to inhabit the kind of
raised-up, premium accommodation and mobility systems so beloved of science fiction writers.
Figure 4 here
Continuing his discussions of working in Hong Kong, Choy talks of a day spent in the company of an executive from the Tsing Tao beer company as
he “wends his way expertly through Wenchai, a government and nightlife district on Hong Kong island, without ever touching the ground” (ibid.)
.Because the city’s deep, canyon-like streets and long podium structures at the base of towers act to channel and contain relatively-heavy polluted
air, this has crucial impacts on relative health of the vertically-stratified population. “In the typical street canyons of Hong Kong, air pollutants tend
to be trapped in the bottom 15 m.” (Wong et al, 2012). Moreover, the massive podium blocks between the streets and the raised walkways in
Hong Kong “not only block most of the wind to pedestrians (affecting comfort and air quality), but also minimize the “air volume” near the
pedestrian level (affecting air quality).” (Ng, 2009).
A: Splintering Air: Vertical Architectures as “Spatialized Immune Systems”
25. 25
“An analysis of air reveals who belongs and who does not, who is deserving and who is not in a constellation of megacity
inequality” (Adey, 213; 4).
“One could [..] lament the splintering of the atmosphere.” (Canetti, 1987; 10).
Figure 5 here
Political ecologies of urban air thus urgently need to address the conditioning of air within interior spaces (for recent progress here, see Biehler and
Simon, 2011). The layered politics of urban atmospheres – our sixth theme -- is not lost on real estate agents and developers who build, design
and market the world’s vertical gated communities. “The Higher You Go, the Cooler You Get!” screams the advertising hoarding at the elite
Indiabulls Sky complex in Mumbai’s central business district (Figure 5).
Perhaps the ultimate capsular or ‘splintered’ living environment (De Cauter, 2005; Graham and Marvin, 2001), the building – marketed under the
banner “way, way above the rest” -- offers a litany of elite, luxury services, a suite of pools, spas and restaurants (all in the relatively cool air above
the 12th
floor; below these in a tall podium of stacked parking garages). In addition, there is private roof-top helipad, and a complex system of air-
conditioning and pollution filtering . In effect, the Sky Complex, like other elite residential towers, works to offer what Philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk’s (2009) has termed as a “spatialized immune system” lifting elites above the bad air and heat—as well as the dense populations of
poorer people -- of the grounded city below.
26. 26
Exploiting the deep etymological and cosmographic connections between height, status and power, the developer of India Bulls, moreover, urges its
customers to “soar higher” to embrace “a lifestyle unprecedented and elevated up to the sky”. On the placard around the corner, startlingly,
vertical height is equated not just with premium atmosphere but with a direct invocation of theological supremacy for the elites lucky enough to
ascend the tower. “Consider it a blessing”, it shouts, “to share the same address as God”. “Where the heavens extend an invitation” is the strapline
of the development’s brochure.
A: Fragmenting Atmospheres:
Vicious Circles of the Air-Con City
`’But where is Utopia, where the weather is 64.4°F...?” (Le Corbusier, 1967; 42).
Seventh, an urban political ecology of air must address the widening and increasingly ambitious processes through which air is deliberately
manufacturing and conditioned. Expected to almost double between 2012 and 2018 – from USD 98.2 billion to 178.4 billion in 2018 -- the global
airconditioning industry is in bonanza mode (Transparency Market Research, 2013). Urbanisation, urban heat-island effects and the very warming of
the planet, combined with the ubiquity of consumer capitalism, provide a perfect market environment for an industry which offers the promise of
manufacturing what Peter Sloterdijk (2010; 94) has called “thematized” or “designed air”. “The breaking up of the social world into spaces of moral
27. 27
interdependence inaccessible to one another,” he suggests, “is analogous to the micro-climatic fragmenting of the atmosphere’” (Sloterdijk, 2009;
99).
The widespread normalisation of expectations amongst middle class and wealthy urbanites in warmer cities that of urban life must consist of a
continuous experience of chilled air manufactured to cover every building or transport choice, adds further to the 10% per annum market global
growth rate (Transparency Market Research, 2013). The growing normalisation of air-con urbanism in hot climates like the Southern US has been
paralleled by major architectural, social and geographic shifts. “By 1960, 20 per cent of homes in the South owned an air conditioner,” writes Pete
Adey:
“ by 1973 80 per cent of [US] cars had air conditioning, as it became felt as an almost legal right. However, this also contributed to a
massive shift in population density [in the southern states] which almost doubled from between 1930 to 1980 due to declining mortality,
and, interestingly, new routines of travel and migration to the ‘sun belt’. The 1970 census was dubbed the ‘air conditioned census’ by the
New York Times because it captured the evolving effect of the technology in creating attractive and comfortable climates in the South,
even in the summer.” (2014; 156).
Many other nations have followed the US path towards mass air-con use. Overwhelmingly, such processes are organised through individualized
market forces distributing personal machines as consumer durables. Such transformations are reflected strikingly in urban landscapes in many
28. 28
megacities where large buildings which gradually become strewn with walls of individual air conditioners (Figure 6).
Figure 6 here
The laws of physics, of course, mean that heat removed from the cooled, bubble-like, air-conned enclosures for the more privileged cannot
disappear. It must, instead, be dumped beyond the walls. The proliferation of air-conditioned environments thus leads to greater amounts of heat
dumping via the heat exchangers on the frontages of the buildings. (Anyone who has stood next to the extracted air next to the aircon outlet of a
major mall, hotel or office complex in a hot city can testify to the fan oven-like experience).
Such external heat dumping further exacerbates both urban heat-island effects (Figure ) and the intolerable temperatures of the wider street
environment. This, in turn, adds to the increasingly desperate urge by those who can afford it to find refuge within an air conditioned environment.
And so the cycle goes on: more air-con, more heat dumping on streets, and ever-greater temperature disjunctures between the street and building
interiors…
Research on the 2003 heat emergency in Paris by Cecile de Munck, of the French Centre for Meteorological Research, suggests that ramped up
air-con use in the city exacerbated the problem. Here “modeling experiments that show excess heat expelled onto the streets because of
29. 29
increased air conditioner usage during heat waves can elevate outside street temperatures significantly” (see Figure 7). Notably, this exacerbation of
heat-island effects is most powerful in the densely-built and largely affluent districts within the centre of Paris – places where air-con has been most
widely installed and where running costs are not a problem (quoted in NASA, 2010).
Figure 7 here
A second vicious circle for air-con cities involves the pressure of the peaks of electricity demand created by urban air-con systems leading to major
power blackouts (see Graham, 2009). Behind the unprecedented blackout across the megalopolitan North Eastern USA on August 14th, 2003 –
the most powerful example thus far -- “lay a power system overloaded by summer energy use, and in particular, dragged down by the burden of air
conditioning” (Grabar, 2013).
In 2013, Aircon accounted for 10% of global electricity demand -- a figure that, with 38 of the world’s 50 biggest cities being in the tropics, is rising
fast (Grabar, 2013). Such growth rates force the use of extra fossil fuels for electricity generation, related threats to energy security, the release of
more particulate matter and greenhouse gasses, and the increased risk of major power outages.
30. 30
Again, the vicious circle here seems inexorable: more air-conditioning, exaggerated climate-change-related temperature rises, increasingly intolerable
urban heat-islands, further demands for air-con environments, and so on. “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-conditioning” (Hutchinson, 2010).
Such feedback loops add further to the vulnerabilities that marginalised urban groups, who have no choice but to endure urban heat-islands
without air-conditioning, face. Detailed research of heat emergencies demonstrates clearly that “ownership and usage of air-conditioners
significantly reduce[s] the effects of temperature” on the wide range of conditions, diseases and ailments that can become killers during urban heat
waves (Ostro et al, 2010; 1053).
The lessons of the killer heat emergencies in Chicago in 1995 and across Europe in 2005 discussed above are again deeply relevant here. There
remains a startling absence of public policies to systematically organise the delivery of adequately cool environments for the city’s poor within
rapidly warming cities faced by dramatic rises in consumer electricity costs (on the Australian case, see Farbotko, and Waitt, 2011).
In such a situation, market-based distribution of life-saving bubbles of coolness can only work to kill increasing numbers of the old, the poor, the
weak and the ill. Many are now arguing that the inevitable failure of markets to deliver socially just cooling mirror the failure of markets for many
31. 31
other ‘public’ goods. Learning from cities like Hartford, Connecticut, for example, Henry Grabar (2013) argues that public, municipal infrastructures
for cooling air are essential to tackle both urban heat crises and the contribution of individualised air con markets to toxic air (after all, many North
American cities have long traditions of organising collective heat, steam and electricity infrastructures).
Many designers are also calling for a rediscovery of design-based solutions to cooling buildings and for a return to altering the choreographies of
everyday and business lives to deal with hot weather (see, for example, Gandy, 2010).
A: Citadels of Death and Atmospheric Apartheid:
Hot Bodies, Cooled Bodies
“As many people are killed on construction sites throughout the world each year as die as a result of armed conflict” (National
Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health, n.d).
If the increasingly hot, urban world can be starkly divided between those who are inside air-con environments and those who are outside, the
massive construction of a whole suite of vast air-conditioned hotels, malls, leisure attractions and even football stadia by armies of near-slave
32. 32
labourers within the 50- degree temperatures of the Qatar --- our penultimate theme -- is the lethal apogee of such injustice.
Two million indentured labourers from Nepal, Pakistan, India and the rest of South and South-east Asia, are constructing these edifices in a $140
billion program to ready to enclave for the 2022 World Cup. The International Trade Union Confederation has warned that 4,000 construction
workers are likely to die before the start of the tournament; at least 185 Nepalis – who make up a sixth of the migrant work force -- died in 2013
alone (Gibson and Pattison, 2014). Over 500 Indian workers -- between 20 and 30 a month -- died between 2012 and 2014 (Gibson, 2014).
Heatstroke and dehydration are the main killers, especially during the summer months (although fatal ‘accidents’ and suicides are also routine).
Most death certificates are marked with the catch-all of ‘natural’ “cardiac arrest” by Qatari Doctors. This deflects attention from the lethal working
environment that is the real cause of such huge death rates. The dark irony is that, when opened, the entire archipelago of bubble-like visitor spaces
– including, the Qatari government claim, five new and one extended stadia -- will be air-conditioned.
The Qatar example, however, is only the most visible of many: the wider construction of a series of what Mike Davis and Dan Monk (2009)
termed “dreamworld of neoliberalism” – in Dubai and Bahrain, most notably -- have been achieved at the expense of unknowable numbers of
33. 33
heat-related deaths amongst near-slave migrant workers. After the UK’s shadow sports minister, Clive Efford, expressed revulsion at the latest
revelations of worker deaths in Qatar, Maher Mughrabi wondered:
“ Where exactly has this man been?” Dubai, Qatar and Bahrain have been hosting 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
festival, the mall with the indoor ski slope or zooming up in the lift 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).
Figure 8 here
“During the summer, temperatures soar above 45 Celsius (113 Fahrenheit), and visitors are advised to walk outdoors only in the evening, and drink
water continually,” writes Richard Abernethy (2010).“Heat stroke is a killer for workers doing heavy physical labour for shifts of 12 hours or longer.”
Human Rights Watch (2006)(Figure 8) cite a report from the journal Construction Week which found that 880 migrant construction workers died
in the UAE in 2004 alone. The Indian consulate, moreover, registered the deaths of 971 Indian citizens in 2005. 61 of these were registered as site
accidents; many were of heat stroke and heat exhaustion; suicides made up the remainder. The report found that “as many as 5,000 construction
workers per month were brought into the accident and emergency department of Rashid Hospital in Dubai during July and August 2004” (Human
34. 34
Rights Watch, 2006).
Journalist, Nesrine Malik (2011), visiting Dubai to research the deaths of migrant workers, found that conditions for Indian workers building Dubai’s
air-conditioned skyscrapers and megaprojects were so appalling that two committed suicide each week. (The first suicide from the world’s tallest
tower, the Burj Khalifa, another Indian migrant worker, happened when she was there. Locals joked callously that the death had “inaugurated the
building” as a suicide platform, such is the frequency of suicide leaps)(ibid.).
A: 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 generation of ‘experience customers’ learned to breathe the intoxicating scent
of an enclosed, interior-world full of commodities” (Dorrian, 2012).
35. 35
Relatedly, an urban political ecology of air must attend, finally, to the proliferation of air –conditioned environments at the macro scale. Increasingly
megalomaniacal use of air-conditioned interiors has been central, for example, to Dubai’s spectacular emergence as the ultimate dreamworld of
neoliberalism. Reaching its extreme with the conceit of a complete, indoor, skiing environment, with real snow in the middle of one of the world’s
hottest deserts (Figure 9), Dubai’s archipelago of air-conditioned interior “experiences” ” each enjoys a wholly manufactured climate. (A project for
a much larger, so far unbuilt, ‘arctic experience’, is to include real Polar Bears)(Dorian, 2012).
Figure 9 here
Dubai’s interior ski spaces – the ultimate interiorisation of ‘nature’ -- echoes architect, Buckminster Fuller’s influential ruminations between the
1940s and 1960s on the possibilities of dome-like constructions at various scales within with urban air could be precisely controlled. (Famously,
Fuller even suggested a giant dome encompassing mid-Town Manhattan which would permanently sustain what he called a “Garden of Eden”
climate”- see Krausse and Kichtenstein, 2001).
To Mark Dorrian (2012) , Dubai’s capsular, air-conditioned interiors echo Fuller’s geodesic domes, with their “complex connotations of autonomy,
encapsulation, and world imagery.” Here, though, the techno-utopia of constructing bubbles for the precise manipulation of urban air – what Mark
36. 36
Dorian (2012) calls a ‘renovated atmosphere’ -- rests, with deep paradox, of the bodies of unknowable labourers who expired through heat
exhaustion in their efforts to project the façade.
The juxtaposition of interiorised simulacra of ‘nature’ unleashes less lethal paradoxes. The interior condition within ‘bubble’ environments like Dubai
ski-dome emerges “more pure, less polluted, and hence more ‘itself’ than in the world beyond, albeit now as commodity.” (Dorian, 2012).
A: (By Way of a) Conclusion: Coming Up for Air
More broadly, of course, as we saw in the case of the Paris killer heat wave in 2003, the incremental privatisation of urban air through the spread
of air-conditioned spaces and enclaves raises massive contradictions at the urban and planetary scales.
Beyond their impacts on construction workers or those inside, the interiorized capsules or privatised air exert their own damage (most notoriously,
of course, with the problems of ‘sick building syndrome’ amongst those who work within capsular environments). They also contribute
disproportionately to the deterioration of the urban and planetary climate outside the engineered bubble.
37. 37
The political ecologies of contemporary urban air are heavily shaped by contradictions between the mass and density of increasingly hot and toxic
urban atmospheres, and proliferating dreams of controlled and cooled microclimates, both mobile and static. Spatialised immune systems, machinic
and architectural, organised around neoliberalised consumption, work eith often murderous injustice. And their sheer density, cheek-by-jowl,
undermines their conceit. “People feel very strongly.” writes Giuditta Vendrame (2012), “that their private constructions of immunity are
endangered by the presence of too many constructions 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 suffocation, of no-breath. On the other (out)side the fear of the unknown, the invisible [hazards of urban air
pollution].”
“Which is and which will be our relationship. to the air? ”, Vendrame asks. “What sort of air do we breath on the inside and outside of our
spaces?” (ibid.),
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Figure Captions
Figure 1: Typical urban heat-island effects in a US city by day and night (Source:
NASA, 2010): http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/heat-island-sprawl_prt.htm
Figure 2: Smog and Simulacrum: The fake skyline erected for tourist use in Hong Kong in 2013. Source:
http://www.ibtimes.com/hong-kong-tourists-use-fake-skyline-backdrop- during-high-pollution-days-photos-
1396217
Figure 3: Air pollution in Shanghai, 2013. Photograph by Fung Leo. Source:
http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=12866901searchId=3aab0a4b8
063f9a9a1d8039a05475e22npos=27
Figure 4: Raised walkway systems, Central, Hong Kong (Photograph: Stephen Graham).
Figure 5: “The higher you go, the cooler you get!” Placards around the IndiaBulls ‘Sky’ residential tower in
downtown Mumbai:, 2011. Photograph by Adam Cooper, reproduced with permission.
Figure 6: The new Great Wall of China? Individual air-con units cover this tower in Fuzhou, China, so densely
that it has become one of the most famous structures in the city and is even a tourist attraction
http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/most-awesome-wall-of-air-conditioners-in- fuzhou.htmlFigure 7:
Calculations of the effect of heat dumping from air-conditioning on the killer
49. 49
heat wave and heat-island during the 2003 emergency in Paris. Credit: Météo France/Cécile de Munck, source
NASA (2010).
Figure 8: Human Rights Watch’s 2006 report of worker deaths building air-conditioned complexes in the USA
(Source: Human Rights Watch, 2006).
Figure 9; Oil and Ice: The world’s largest freezer. SkiDubai’s 400 meter slopes are maintained at a constant -2
C even when summer temperatures beyond the walls soar past 50 C
http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=10559969searchId=cd5bce6e1
eebc4a6502d9334b77d79c7npos=22