Introduction
On January 12 and 23, 2023, WAVEMATTERS organized together with the research project The Urban Microclimate Regime: The Constitution of Spaces and Infrastructures of Heat at the Department of European Ethnology, HU-Berlin, the workshop “HEATMATTERS: Disturbing Air, Bodies, and Infrastructures“. We are thanking again the amazing contributors Dorothee Brantz (Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technical University Berlin, Jakkrit Sangkhamanee (Chulalongkorn University), Hannah Knox (University College London), Eva Horn (University of Vienna), Elena Beregow (University of the Bundeswehr Munich), Elspeth Oppermann (National University of Singapore), Zofia Boni & Franciszek Chwałczyk (University of Poznan), and Madlen Kobi (University of Fribourg) for the joint adventure of thinking and disturbing with heat! From the continuum of the projects WAVEMATTERS and Microclimatic Regimes contributed Elisabeth Luggauer, Jorge Martín Sainz de los Terreros, Indrawan Prabaharyaka and Maru Tess. Out of this workshop we produced a collection of summaries of the various talks, an audio documentation of heatmatters in 9 segments – see below.
As a physical energy, heat is everywhere. Heat circulates in the air and the atmosphere, is radiated, conducted and convected by and between air, bodies and materials. Heat is fundamental for live and growing, produced and balanced by bodies to keep metabolisms functioning. In the contexts of the capitalogenic climate crisis, heat becomes framed and problematized as accelerating global warming.
In everyday lives of humans and other than humans, in urban microclimates as well as urban planning, heat matters and materializes in multiple ways: as weather, as a perceived atmosphere, as the spatial and seasonal phenomena of heat islands and heat waves, as an effect of materials and combinations of materials and bodies, as a product of friction, as a result of built formations, construction and infrastructure, as stress and risk for health, and in many more.
Hence, the aim of the workshop “HEATMATTERS: Disturbing Air, Bodies, and Infrastructures” was to approach heat in its plurality of sun radiation, urban heat islands, global and local warming, and temporal peaks of heat waves, that materializes and becomes sense-able in the air and atmosphere bodies are enveloped in. We wanted to gather, collect and map out how heat comes to matter by being explored, researched and conceptualized in a transdisciplinary continuum of Urban Studies, Multispecies Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Environmental Humanities.
The questions, we raised were:
1. How does heat flow, matter, materialize, assemble and disturb in urban spaces? What are possible ontologies of heat?
2. How does heat become senseable and how is exposure of human and other bodies to heat happening and done? How is heat as airborne and atmospheric graspable through ethnographic research?
3. How can heat be conceptualized as a thermic agent bringing together and assembling materials, bodies and multispecies entanglements? How do air and atmosphere matter as medium for heat and as spheres in which bodily exposure, being affected by heat and reproducing heat happens and is done?
4. How does heat lead to and enable (social) infrastructure? How to plan, design, and infrastructure heat resilient spaces? How does heat change and shape practices of urban planning and urban design?
Contributions
The talks engaged these questions from a broad range of perspectives.
Dorothee Brantz showed how seasonal environmental heat contributed to the formation of modern slaughterhouse infrastructures in the city of Chicago, how heat was enabled as a factor for meat production by means of tempering a space, cleaning and sanitizing, boiling and cooking, but also how again the challenges environmental heat poses to food production eventually led to the development of cooling infrastructures.
Jakkrit Sanghamanee discussed short circuits in buildings in Bangkok as a disturbance of the flux of electricity that leads to urban fires particulary in densely built and inhabited spaces. The fires resulting from interruptions in a system intended to be a closed one are induced by moments of simultaneous absence of components enabling the flow of electricity and presence of leaks and interruptions in the infrastructure. Out of such conjuncture of absence and presence, and inspired by Annemarie Mol and John Laws ideas of topology, Sanghamanee ultimately suggests a “topology of fire” as a perspective on Bangkok were fires are even present when they seem absent.
In their joint presentation, Indrawan Prabaharyaka and Maru Tess followed concepts of wind and the circulation of air from early ideas of climatology developed from the engagement with “Kaltluftschneisen” (streams of cold air) in Stuttgart, Germany, along their equivocation in practices of constructing built formations that enable and reinforce the circulation of air in Japanese cities which became known as Feng Shui.
Hannah Knox set the focus of her talk on insulation, and the struggles of dwellers in the cold and humid climate of Britain to seal the walls of their buildings in order to disable streams of cold air coming inside homes and at the same time preventing the heated up indoor air from getting lost through the walls. Knox follows initiatives that aim for an understanding of insulation as a political matter, provided and implemented by the government in order to reduce – on a planetary scale – energy consumption and hence – on the scale of everyday life – costs of living. Out of this context, she argues for thinking of insulation as an infrastructure and hence an energy-political matter.
Eva Horn unfolds historical discourses of human-climate relations in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. She follows heat as a political trope for a thermic anthropology through the works of Charles Montesquieu and others and points out how this western modernist topology of ‘cold cultures’, who would be more rational and more productive than the rather lazy, less organized but also more sexual ‘hot cultures’ set the ground for climate deterministic concepts of human-environment relations.
From an intersectional take on sweating as social practice, Elena Beregow points out the deep inscription of the racialized projection of different thermoceptions to the bodies of persons of color than to those of white people in western epistemology. She reflects upon the social construction of sweating on the one hand as a stigmatized symbol for the physical labour of the working class, and on the other as connected to an aesthetics of fitness and health and points out the precarity of sweating, since humid heat accelerating with global warming might at some point not make it possible anymore for bodies to cool themselves down by sweating.
Elspeth Oppermann focuses on the bodies of workers on construction sites in Singapore. Twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, the workers are exposed to environmental heat. Production structures and working conditions do not allow enough to cool down in breaks in the shade and to hydrate, which leads to heat exhaustion and heat strokes. The workers’ struggles of balancing environmental and metabolic heat become reinforced by the heat produced as a necessity of construction, such as by heavy machines and the heat needed to melt and re-form substances and materials. While building is in architecture and urban planning often understood as given and a result, Oppermann stresses that building is also a verb and a process, a process in and with environmental, metabolic and produced heat. She suggests to rethink building as a rhythm and reciprocity of these different heat components.
Zofia Boni and Franciszek Chwałczyk reflect upon heat waves in Madrid and Warsaw as multiple and messy objects that have different significance and different temporalities to climate scientists, to policy makers, such as epidemiologists, and to elderly inhabitants of the both cities. For climate scientists heatwaves are excessively hot and often also humid weather. Epidemiologists pay attention to developing thresholds to calculate heat as a risk, and in their perspective, heat waves start from much lower temperatures than they do in the perspectives of climate scientists. While epidemiologists and climate scientists characterize heat waves as separated from everyday lives, for elderly urban dwellers heat waves are a part of their (seasonal) everyday lives, and while climate scientists and epidemiologists measure the intensity of heat and calculate its risk with technical device, urban dwellers mobilize their bodies as everyday thermal sensoria.
Madlen Kobi tackles the question of how exposure to heat is modulated by paying attention to practices of air-conditioning homes in postsocialist Chongqing (China). Kobi unfolds how air conditioning is an assemblage of practices of passive and active modes of cooling, such as enabling ventilation and shading and active cooling through air conditioning machines, and how inhabiting is a thermal arrangement that includes positioning the furniture and dedicating sitting and resting spots etc. in coordination with thermal flows created passively and actively.
Elisabeth Luggauer includes more than human bodies in similar ethnographic explorations of air-conditioning as a set of thermal practices composed of opening and closing windows and doors, opening and closing blinds, and sometimes adding the cool stream of an air-conditioning machine into an indoor atmosphere. Out of the research context of a multispecies home shaped by the thermal needs and comforts of a woman, dogs and cats, and inspired by Nicole Starosielski’s take on the thermostat as historically a labor of female housekeepers, she suggests a perspective on ‘thermostating’ as a multispecies thermal practice.
Jorge Martín Sainz de los Terreros introduced and moderated the first public viewing of fragments of the back then still in production movie WAVEMATTERS and Jos Temprano produced out the special format Sensing and making sense of cities as wave fields: A multimodal guided bus tour through “hot spots” in Madrid, which has in the meantime become an officially released video.
Once again, thank you to all contributors for this rich and fabulous event!
The audio documentation is produced by Elisabeth Luggauer, Nelson Ari Wilhelm, and Maru Tess.