Goin’ Where the Wind Blows: Urban Ventilations in Stuttgart and Fukuoka

In this presentation, we focus on one element—wind—of the contemporary microclimatic regime of city-making in two cities, Stuttgart and Fukuoka. The Climate Atlas and the concept of climatope therein have been deployed to continue the projects of making room for flows of fresh and cold air to cool down Stuttgart’s city centre at nights of unbearable summer heat. In order to maintain the urban ventilation where the wind blows, policymakers have been using the Climate Atlas as a planning instrument for evaluating an area’s climatope before granting the permit to developers. But, in the second most expensive German city in terms of housing price, it has also unsurprisingly been triggering lawsuits. The city becomes a legal warzone in which urban climate (Stadtklima) and urban development (Stadtentwicklung) are in conflict. One recent battlefront that comes into view is the interim Opera House, whose site candidates were rejected by climatologists on the one hand and advocated by architects on the other hand. In this battle of maintaining fresh air routes, unlike the projects of harnessing wind power that have apparent symbolic-material forms of turbine, urban ventilation functions and becomes powerful when it seems void, invisible and taken for granted. Like what Mike Hulme has proposed, the sky becomes an agonistic field of cultivation, although what is harvested is not the mechanical power but the thermal comfort of wind. As a coda, we end this presentation with a vignette of an ethnographic encounter in Fukuoka, a Japanese city to which climate mapping and the studies of urban ventilation have travelled. There, the German story of urban ventilation gets intertwined and densely equivocated with Feng Shui, when translated as “Kaze no Michi” (literally means wind roads). As a result, different makings of feng shui emerge and wind roads become the territory of national identity negotiation.
Going where the wind blows is not going whichever way the wind blows, unplanned and unthinking; we mean instead paying attention to the specific sites and routes where the wind blows and where cultural-juridical differences take shape and disputes take place.
 

 
transcript
  
Indra:
  
We would like to tell stories about one particular element of contemporary microclimatic regime in two cities, Stuttgart and Fukuoka. And we want to introduce one way of reading microclimate plans in these cities, namely as hologram.

A hologram is something different from binary. So unlike binary in a hologram, two or more things can overlap simultaneously. In Stuttgart, the hologram can be seen in the simultaneous coexistence, let’s say, between formal and informal regulation. And then in Fukuoka, the hologram is rather in the form of an overlapping of Western and Eastern knowledge, Feng Shui in this case.
  
So Stuttgart is like a Kessel, like a cattle. And then the city centre is right here on the bottom of the cattle. And then in order to channel the wind, the municipality, the Stadtverwaltung, say ”oh, you need to conserve the area around the semi valley, the Halbhöhenlage, and then create a plan for that.” On May 9, 2011, there is a landowner, I don’t know whether they are a male or a female, but in the Entscheidung it says Antragstellerin, so I assume that this is a lady, and she submitted an objection for a plan. She says ”oh, this is an illegal plan, because you made this plan without any consultation. And then she believed: ”I Want to expand my house, basically. And it’s it’s quite small. There will no be no climatic impact to the city, it is very small”, and then almost four years it’s quite long and then the court decided the request is dismissed, it’s rejected. And then there was a scientist who attended the hearing and said like ”oh, there were already a few cold air routes, Kaltluftschneisen in Stuttgart, which are already very vulnerable and very sensitive. And if you build something here, even though it’s small, it will impact the whole wind circulation”. And then the court explicitly mentioned that this is an informal instrument that has an exceptional meaning in planning processes.

I will not say that the semi valley plan is entirely informal because it has references and they are quite formal, although of course if we think of planning process as something that occur not only in planning offices, in municipal halls, but also in everyday conversation like what we’re doing now, then it is also informal at the same time. So I would like to explain what I’m trying to say, that the urban climate plan is a hologram –I got this from Stefan Helmreich actually, that it can be two things or more formal and informal at the same time.
  
This is actually part, of a long, long history. So in 1939, the municipality of Stuttgart hired a meteorologist, Karl Schwab, and he would state: ”You need to do you need to deal with the problem of air hygiene in Stuttgart and also take part in the civil protection” because it was during the war and they go to the rooftops and then spread the powder to cover the city centre during the war, so that it will be will not be attacked by the air raid from the allies. But of course, it’s failed. Why? It’s failed because there is radar and then it’s practically destroyed within a couple of days. So that’s how the story goes. But then the experiment gave birth to the empirical urban climatology. So Karl Schwalb from the top of a Turm, from a tower could see oh, from where to where exactly the wind blows, where it stays where it moves faster, where it moves slower, how the wind has an intersection with buildings, where it comes from, and so on and so forth. And then after that, from 19 – this is in 1969 – and then from 1970 to 1990, there are at least four infrared thermography flights. So suddenly this appears in the 1980s and this becomes a sort of tool that formalise the whole experiments of urban climatology that have been done before.
  
These are the prototype of something called Climatopes. So climatetope in German urban climatology is the smallest representational unit in which the thermal behaviour in this unit is assumed to be similar. And then this will be used together with the former thermal map and also the wind map and so on to produce recommendations: Which parts need to be maintained, which parts can be redeveloped and so on and so forth. It’s called Planungshinweise, like the recommendation for planning. And then, this is in 2007, so basically the the semi-valley-plan that I mentioned in the beginning is something like this. The goal is to to maintain the green areas that surround the whole of the city centre in this area.
  
Now going back to my argument that the urban climate plan is something holographic so it can be formal and informal at the same time. There are some interlocutors, they are all Stuttgarter and they talk about wind and air in Stuttgart like breathing. They are so passionate talking about when an air – you can try. So this is like an everyday knowledge for for many Stuttgarters.
 
  
 
Maru
  
I would like to tell the story of how this German knowledge Indrawan talked about gets equivocated in Japan with feng shui upon its arrival in Japan. Using two vignettes from the archive and my fieldwork, I would like to tell the story of equivocations and negotiations of knowledge systems emerging at the point of encounter between German, Japanese, and Chinese scientists.

Klimaatlas or Climate Planning and the climate knowledge from Stuttgart was exported in the nineties everywhere in the world. But with the help of German researchers, it was Japan and Japanese scientists who pioneered climatic and forward planning. German urban climatological knowledge has been adopted in Japanese urban planning. Several cities such as Kobe, Tokyo, Fukuoka, have produced their own climate maps, which informs planning, recommendation maps, heat island countermeasures guidelines and finally influences also masterplans. But this German climate knowledge, as I will tell, gets entangled with feng shui and as a result, different makings of feng shui emerge and also urban ventilation or wind roads become also the territory of national identity negotiation.
  
So we are in 1999 in Freiburg, Toshiaki Ichinose is a visiting scholar in Freiburg in the Meteorological department. He writes a post for the Japanese National Institute for Environmental Studies website titled Days Immersed in the German Language. He writes: “What I would like to learn here is the German environmental symbiotic urban planning technology, especially urban thermal environmental control represented by the wind path; Kaze no Michi in Japanese. This might be called a Western feng shui. However, many of today’s big cities in Asia, the birthplace of feng shui culture, face problems such as serious air pollution and rising temperatures. I am conducting this overseas Research hoping that this feng shui can be applied to Asian megacities.
  
In the same year 1999, Toshiaki Ichinose writes a paper with Hans-Peter Thamm where they discussed the necessity of applying Luftleitbahnen, air channels,this air channel strategy in Japan, and the necessity to invent a Japanese-style wind path. In fact, scholars such as Ichinose saw the potentiality of enhancing wind ventilation in Japan using German knowledge.
  
The paper I mentioned is the first time where the term Kaze no michi, wind roads, as a direct translation of Luftleitbahnen appears, and is discussed broadly. When coining the term, he recalls again that in Asia, a knowledge system already observes the wind to create a liveable environment based on urban planning and architecture. And this is feng shui. Before that time, the term Kaze no Michi had just a poetic connotation and was very scarcely used. But since the nineties, Kaze no Michi has been describing wind path and more broadly also Japanese ventilation strategies. The term booms and now is frequently used in urban planning.
  
Now we’re in Japan, Fukuoka, 13th December 2022. I meet Wang Qing, a PhD student who works on wind corridors in China, and pays attention to traditional knowledge, Feng shui. She explains to me, Feng shui is very important in our education in China. We need to read a lot of traditional books. It is very hard to understand. But to build wind corridors, now we also do analysis and we use now the green sources spaces theory. And this is a theory that comes from Germany. I quote Stuttgart and she gets very lively all of a sudden. Yes, that city. I see that all my professors in China have studied in Stuttgart, so I want to do my postdoc there. I came to Japan because after Germany, Japan is the best place where to study wind corridors.
  
So these two stories show the making of feng shuis or different feng shuis – plural  – through transnational frames. In the first case, the first story of Toshiaki Ichinose,  feng shui serves as a reference point to name the German knowledge system. First, in order to grasp and name Klimaatlas, so Klimaatlas as a German feng shui – or a Western Feng shui or German feng shui, and then Toshiaki Ichinose renegotiates feng shui as an Asian theory to localise urban ventilation, knowledge acquired in Germany.
  
So in conclusion, I argue that the feng shui which emerged in the scientific transnational encounter in the nineties could be inquired in the field of microclimatic adaptation as a concept that informants used to think other concepts with amidst equivocations and national identity negotiation over the wind.
 
  
 
Indra
  
So back to the argument of urban climate plan as a hologram. So at the dinner with Stephan Helmreich, we were talking about hologram as something that is simultaneously present and diffracted. And then hologram in itself is a superimposition of waveforms, creating a depth, a sense of three dimensional.  I would like to end with a bit of reflection on Bruno Latour‘s invitation to do landing. So this kind of, you know, reconnect or reconcile, reconcile the land we live in and the line we live from. So land in Stuttgart, they are restricted by the air. These climatological experiments stimulate the deterrestrialization of thought. So, to think not only about the terrestrial but also the atmospheric, and in the case of Fukuoka, there is also the oceanic.