Thermal Governance: Air-conditioning Complexes and Climate Change in Urban Asia

mardi 26 avril 2022
à 13:15
Cycle de conférences

Jiat-Hwee Chang, associate professor, National University of Singapore

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 argued that access to air-conditioning is no longer a luxury but a necessity, or even a right. They have highlighted the vulnerabilities associated with uneven access to cooling in an unequal world. The crux of the matter is: 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. It attempts to construct a history of what I call thermal governance, or state interventions in managing bodily and environmental heat. Thermal governance entails a whole array of technologies, of which air-conditioning is only one, albeit a major one. By emphasizing thermal exchanges and energetic intermediation, this history takes a multi-scalar approach that connects bodies with interiors, buildings, cities, and the planet. In emphasizing governance, it explores the socio-technical configurations and technopolitics of regulating temperatures and metabolisms. This lecture directs our attention away from the global north to explore cases drawn from Singapore and Doha, two cities in hot regions that are heavily dependent on air-conditioning. It traces their historical transformations and thermopolitics of air-conditioning lock-in. It also follows their on-going experiments of reconfiguring their technologies of cooling for a low-carbon and hot future.