Tracing the energetic expenditures of built environments. Considering heat’s agential accretions in the urban landscape

This paper maps a move from considering the temporality of heat, and energy more broadly, as rhythm, to thinking about how heat accretes in infrastructures. Like a carbon footprint, what thermal footprint or energetic expenditures (a la Bataille) went into the production of the landscapes we traverse? Were these always benign or did they sometimes disturb bodies’ thermal regulations and cardiac rhythms causing thermal harm or thermal violence (Starosielski, 2019), relying on dysrhythmic assemblages to produce built forms whose completion obscures all that went into their construction? In the shadow of the World Cup, we are questioning what human labour goes into our buildings, and whether – given the hundreds of deaths from heat stress – we should begin to trace the energetic exchanges, accruals and overloads that built our built environment. What human-non-human, machinic and bodily, workforces burnt and absorbed various forms of energy as heat in the process?  Often inputs of energetic labour only become apparent when they break down: when heat triggers cessations of work or cardiac arrest. As we progress into runaway climate change, the thermal inputs and excesses of production and productivity become ever more obvious and more dangerous.

 

Reference:
Nicole Starosielski (2022). Media Hot and Cold. Durham: Duke.

@workshop HEATMATTERS
January 2023, Institute for European Ethnology, HU-Berlin
Transcript of audio summary

 

I want to start with the observation that we’ve spent a lot of time in geography, sociology, design and planning, and social sciences generally, thinking about energy in urban environments. Yet somehow the basic elements of those environments, i.e. the buildings, the major infrastructure is always seen as given as springing from design into actuality without actually passing through any intervening period of being built. Such that states of unfinishedness, particularly buildings, building as a verb, but also the maintenance and refurbishments of buildings, is often excluded from our imaginary of the urban. With the result that the literal making of places is occluded from our study of placemaking.

 

In this paper, I want to trouble that sort of glossing over of how the urban environment comes to be and to do so in relation to heat. In parallel, I want to start to kind of map out what might be a move from considering heat as rhythm to thinking about how heat is necessary for the production of the built environment such that it can be said to accrete in or leave traces through urban forms and infrastructures. In other words, energy leaves traces of materials and new material arrangements. And then I want to conclude by asking what that means for how we understand and evaluate the globe, including urban environment and how we evaluate practices of design.

 

So, I guess, the first question is why I am talking about rhythm, and really this is a sort of self-critique. I should be clear that this has been work that Gordon Walker and I’ve been doing essentially using rhythm as a way to describe the temporal and spatial material patterning of heat, understood as thermal flow – and of course, in doing that, we’re drawing on Lefevbre, Bataille, and Tim Ingold.

 

But that focus on heat per se has blinkered me at least, to what happens before and after heat. What conditions or materials, chemical or physical are required to enable heat to be produced in the first place? Perhaps in the body what is needed first are sugars for metabolic activity or the kinetic capacity of the human musculoskeletal assemblage. An the even more interesting question, I think, is, and one that I forget to ask is what happens next? What happens after heat? If heat is an outcome of work of some kind, what transformations does it herald? What items does it move? What accretions of asset does it leave in our landscape or take from it? In other words, what traces do thermal emissions leave? We might think about the urban heat island effect, where concrete absorbs heat in the day and then releases it at night, changing the local climate in a way that’s very significant for human health. In other cases, heat might not be so temporary, it might leave permanent changes to materials. We can think about the scorch marks around a welding site or welded material itself, leaving behind it sort of fluid, looking yet actually solid pieces of joint material. So, the heat has come, it’s done its work and it’s gone, but it’s left behind a steel frame that before was in pieces and now can hold up a building for decades to come.

 

Here, perhaps a little facetiously, we can reverse the observation that architecture orchestrates heat and say heat orchestrates architecture. We can even go as far as imagining our cities as not being concrete solids, but as being sort of snapshots in slow motion, building on Starosielski’s observation that temperature evokes a sense of media, not as stable, but as a dynamic entity. In fact, Lefevbre would go so far as to argue that rhythm applies here too as long as we think at the right temporal scales to actually be able to see that dynamism.

 

I guess I’ve kind of come full circle back to rhythm by reimagining the solid matter of cities as mobile, products of energetic exchange and movement, including heat. We’ve talked about the direct shaping of the urban landscape. But sometimes that heat happens at one remove from the matter of the urban itself. It happens in the bodies that actually mobilise and manipulate that matter, whether it’s by which I mean workers moving pieces of wood, moving metals, stone shaping joists, hammering nails, drilling things, screwing things together. Their physical work also produces heat through the exertion of the body. And also it often requires them to be exposed to heat, the heat of the sun or the heat generated by tools and machinery. As such, the work done and left in the landscape has required endogenous, i.e. internal and exogenous exposure to heat that is processed in human bodies. We could argue then that there is, if you like, a footprint of heat stress entailed in any built form, and this applies not only to the exertional bodies but also to the operation of machines. But heat does on occasion semi-permanent or permanent traces. Here, the body, like the built environment, records the passage of heat through its effect. So, although heat itself is invisible, its effects are not. And so, we have a kind of a record or a footprint of thermal energetic expenditure.

 

This brings me then to the real push for a thermal footprint as a kind of thought experiment in thinking about the built environment. It’s a way of accounting for the human effort and the non-carbon impacts that went into its construction. In fact, we need to consider this as, of course, been most drastically highlighted during the recent World Cup.

 

So, I think this is why it’s important to account for thermal inputs into urban landscapes. We cannot treat them as unimportant or as negligible because they can enact significant harm and violence, indeed significant thermal harm and thermal violence, as Starosielski would put it. To make this really clear, I think we should be asking quite explicitly what heat is required to build a building. Just as in the context of green infrastructure, the thermal impact of the building on the surrounding area is increasingly being considered and the energy needs of the building to stay cool or indeed warm are being considered. So, we’re looking at carbon footprint. We should also start thinking about something like a thermal footprint at the design stage, especially in hot regions and especially in the context of climate change. We need to start asking what role does heat play in creating the landscapes that we traverse? Was the thermal footprint always benign, i.e. temporary, manageable, returning bodies to homeostatic states, allowing workers to go home healthy like the railway line that cools back into shape? Or was the thermal footprint sometimes so excessive that it disturbed bodies, thermal regulations causing discomfort, pain, damage, and even death? In other words, do building our urban landscape entail thermal harm or thermal violence? And does it rely on, as I suspect it does in Singapore and Qatar and perhaps many other places, dis-rhythmic assemblages where the pain of the subaltern ensures the functioning of the cooler urban system. So, for those reasons, I think we need to start counting and accounting for the energies that produce and maintain the urban environment, now, infrastructure more broadly. So, the objective then of thermal footprint in our assessment would be to make work production thermally neutral in the same way as we do with carbon offsetting and thereby keep workers healthy and alive, putting in protective measures to effectively offset them across.

 

Okay. Just to close off then, using this thought experiment or idea about the thermal footprint, I hope to have shown in a way the vibrancy of matter visible through tracing how matter came to be in the place or form that it takes in the urban environment as a result of energetic expenditure and transformation. I tried to pay particular attention to heat to do this, but of course there are many other forms of energy, kinetic energy, chemical energy that we could also do the same experiment with, as a sort of exercise to expand our way of looking at the urban environment and unravelling its form.