Neighbors Vol. 6: Thermal Governance and Citizenship: (Un)Making Air-conditioning Complexes in Urban Asia by Jiat-Hwee Chang / TPOD, THEMA, HITAM

How did cities around the world become dependent on air conditioning? Given that conventional air conditioning is warming the planet and exacerbating the climate crisis, how are cities reconfiguring their cooling technologies and urban spaces to reduce reliance on mechanical cooling? This talk explores these questions by examining Singapore and Doha, two cities in the planetary hotspots of sweltering tropical and desert regions. Both cities are also past and future thermal frontiers: they were among the first in their regions to have ubiquitous air conditioning and are now laboratories for intensive experimentation with novel, low-carbon cooling technologies and spaces for the future.

Through architectural case studies that embed variegated spatio-environmental cooling technologies across different scales in the past and present, this talk explores the postcolonial environmental and technological politics of cooling through the concepts of thermal governance and citizenship. Rather than attributing the globalization of air conditioning solely to thermal capitalism, I argue that thermal governance—state intervention in the distribution of heat—was central to creating air conditioning dependency in Singapore and Doha. Through infrastructural provisions, thermal governance shaped urban spaces and the everyday lives of their populations, creating specific sensorial entitlements that constitute thermal citizenship. Maintaining these forms of thermal entitlement in Singapore and Doha has been central to the legitimacy of the states, which in turn accounts for their active investments in novel, low-carbon cooling technologies and spaces in a warming world.