Insulating Urban Heat

In this talk I explore urban heat from the perspective of insulation. Much attention has been paid to the thermodynamic promise of energygeneration based on its conceptualisation of energy as work. But what of energy conservation? What are the commitments and promises of energy conservation, and what can a focus on insulation as conservation tell us about urban heat and its role in framing the politics of climate and energy? In this paper I focus on ethnographic work in which I have been looking at the practices and challenges of insulating UK homes. Insulation aims to create a barrier between the inside and the outside, preventing excess heat from entering in the summer, and precious energy from being lost in the winter. But to insulate successfully demands an attention to much more than thermodynamics. Insulating raises questions about money, expertise, property, space, and the aesthetics of buildings. New forms of heat energy such as heat pumps rely on insulation to perform their effectiveness, meanwhile mould spores gather and spread when insulation goes wrong, creating the need to engage with other material processes such as moving air, evaporation, and dessication to stop insulation becoming toxic. With the appearance in 2022 of the protest group ‘Insulate Britain’ a broader politics of insulation has also been brought into view, highlighting the political choices that have prevented insulation in the past and now threaten to limit a viable future. This paper explores these dynamics, showing how insulation opens urban heat up in ways that point to the challenges that we can expect to face as heat becomes an ever-more-present concern of contemporary urban politics.
 

@workshop HEATMATTERS
January 2023, Institute for European Ethnology, HU-Berlin
Transcript of audio summary
 
 
I want to think with insulation in this paper, because I think it’s a really interesting entity to think about and understand the politics of urban heat. Insulation draws our attention to heat as a political material where questions over how and what to heat also entail questions over how to live together.
  
Insulate Britain was a UK offshoot of Extinction Rebellion. From September to December 2001 they used the direct action tactic of blocking key motorways, mainly in the overcrowded southeast of England, with the aim of politicising insulation, turning it from a mundane detail of building design into a matter of public concern. Their demands sounded simple. Insulate all social housing by 2025 and support the retrofit of all homes in Britain by 2030. But public support for their demands turned out to be weak in spite of a looming energy crisis and a rebound in post-COVID carbon emissions in 2020 to insulate Britain and admitted their tactics had failed.
 
Whilst insulate Britain brought retrofit into public consciousness in 2021, the call to better insulate the country’s homes was not new. Climate change activists and engineers have been arguing since at least the mid-2000s that in order to decarbonise the UK housing stock improving energy efficiency is really key. At the same time government support for insulating homes has been really limited and it’s been fraught with loads of challenges and it’s been a persistently low priority for government spending.
 
Insulation is hidden in walls and loft spaces. It keeps the heat in or out only for those who happen to live kind of coddled by this insulating materials. And so it’s resisted becoming infrastructural, and instead it’s been governed through various loans and grants and incentives and trials and standards and regulatory mechanisms that have tried to put responsibility for insulating onto the owners and buildings and tenants of houses.
 
So positioned both as a medium of hope and an object of political ambivalence not simply as a material or a technology, but as a kind of form of media that collapses form and meaning into each other allows us to attend both to the form that insulation takes in the meaning which is carried by that form. I think it also allows us to look at the way that insulation exists in relation to other media, whether that’s the thermographic cameras or EPC ratings of buildings or accreting spores of mould or the ticking numbers of a gas metre.
 
So, seeing insulation as media offers us a way of understanding how something is mundane as a spongy cushion of fibreglass or a block of kingspan foam might extend itself into other relations and in doing so become a matter of environmental politics, broadly conceived. And crucially for this workshop, seeing insulation as media allows us to look not only at its ontological properties as a singular class of object, but consider what it is that insulation is actually mediating. And I think this question brings us back to the topic of heat.
 
I want to think a bit more deeply about the persistent de-politicisation of retrofit in policymaking by zooming in more on the relationship between insulation and heat.
 
So, retrofit is a term that describes the work of turning draughty old homes into warm, energy efficient ones by installing a range of technical measures from double-glazed windows to loft and board insulation. And I had the chance to observe a number of retrofit projects close up when doing fieldwork in Manchester on climate change and policy making. Installing insulation generally means that less heat energy is required to warm a home and to heat it up and to keep it warm. And this has led to the core argument that retrofitting homes primarily offers a way of reducing fuel use and cutting carbon emissions. Most of the insulation schemes that have been trialled and that have failed have been justified on the basis of reducing the absolute energy used within a home with the claim that it helps the grid and that it reduces emissions and importantly that it reduces people’s bills.
 
Now, there’s lots of reasons why it failed, and I’m not going to go into all of them here. But for our purposes today, I want to talk about how these failed initiatives relate to a dominant framing of insulation and its relationship to heat. So, what we can see in these schemes like the Green Deal, is that they rest on an idea that insulation brings about savings. And in this, within this framework, heat is treated as a constant. So, the standard 19 to 21 degrees that a home should ideally be heated to. In order to maintain this constant temperature of the ideally heated home sources of energy or the amount of energy used is treated as a variable that could be used to a greater or lesser degree to achieve this heat effect. So, in this framing, insulation offers a way of maintaining heat as a constant with less energy input.
 
But there are other ways that insulation can be thought about in relation to heat which disrupt this logic. So, people who are concerned with issues of fuel, poverty, and social justice put forward an alternative scenario which is that of the underheated home. In this case, when you install insulation into a home, insulation goes into places that have previously been really hard to heat up and they’re currently being underheated or maybe people aren’t using the heating at all. Here, then putting insulation in isn’t really meant to reduce energy use, but it’s meant to make the energy that is used more effective to make it worthwhile for people to even bother turning the heating off at all in the first place. So, in this scenario, insulation isn’t about energy saving and money necessarily. How and where people find heat is complex and insulation can be the difference between heating a home or not heating it.
So, although insulating homes seems like a practical solution to heat loss by closing up a leaky open system and preventing heat from escaping as we’ve already covered, houses are not actually closed systems like refrigerators or thermos flasks.
 
So, this section is reflecting on some experiences from participating in a series of workshops I was involved in between 2021 and 2022. People compared their houses with other people’s houses. They talked about fabric and materials, so they compared the warmth of their timber-framed house with the cold of a brick. Some talked about the weather and talked about the wind that whips up through this housing estate where they live, which is located high on a hill which is really exposed to the weather. Some of them talked about how they’ve got sheds in front of the houses which help guard the front windows from the wind that would hit the shed first and then it would rise up over the house.
 
Insulation is not introduced on neutral grounds. It intervenes into a domestic environmental milieu that’s replete with objects that are already understood to mediate heat and energy in their own ways.
And this maybe explains why when insulation is introduced as a possibility, its appearance is frequently contentious. Some were worried about the negative effects of insulation, citing stories where houses had been insulated so badly by social landlords that it had led to accretions of damp and mold. In these cases, insulation mediated not just the semiotics of heat in concepts like warmth and comfort, but also mediated heat in really material ways which created not only well-insulated surfaces but also gaps that manifested as cold spots and walls where moisture droplets would form.
 
So, in terms of urban heat, I think maybe insulation can help us to think about the dangers of simplification and the importance of understanding heat as more than thermodynamics. And I think it kind of pushes, push me anyway, towards thinking about urban heat as a relation between materials that manifests in meaningful but also sometimes violent ways in the injustices of social life.