Thermal Governance: Air-conditioning Complexes and Climate Modulation in Urban Asia
Channel: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Date: 2023-11-22

24 May 2023

Architecture Summer Series
A series of talks and discussions showcasing new research and approaches to thinking about buildings, cities, and landscapes in Britain and elsewhere.

Paul Mellon Centre and Online

As temperature rises and heat waves become more frequent and intense due to the climate crisis, air conditioning has received much attention from international media and global environmental NGOs. Among other things, they have highlighted the projected escalation in demand for mechanical cooling and the attendant problems in energy demand and carbon emission. Some have also foregrounded the vulnerabilities associated with uneven access to cooling in an unequal world, and argued that access to air conditioning is no longer a luxury but a necessity, or even a right. The crux of the matter seems to be: how do we cool the world’s population in an equitable manner without warming the planet?

This lecture seeks to address this question concerning the global future of cooling by understanding how we have arrived at the present through cases drawn from two cities in hot climatic regions that are heavily dependent on air conditioning – Singapore and Doha. It develops the concept of thermal governance to bring together the whole array of techniques and technologies – with air conditioning as a major one – deployed by a modern state to modulate heat under a single analytical framework of rethinking political power. The “thermal” in the concept emphasises the spatial connections of thermal exchanges across different scales – bodies, interiors, buildings, cities and the planet. It also enables the lecture to bring together scholarships from various disciplines concerning thermal energetic mediation. The “governance” in the concept allows the lecture to move away from techno-centric and even techno-determinist understandings of managing heat to critique the uneven socio-spatio-technical configurations and unequal techno-politics of cooling.