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Life support: The political ecology ofurban airStephen GrahamPublished online: 01 Apr 2015.

To cite this article: Stephen Graham (2015) Life support: The political ecology of urbanair, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 19:2-3, 192-215, DOI:10.1080/13604813.2015.1014710

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Life supportThe political ecology of urban air

Stephen Graham

Humans, increasingly, manufacture their own air. In and around the three-dimensionalaerial environments within and above urban regions, this manufacture of air reaches par-ticular levels of intensity. For a species that expires without air in two or three minutes,this anthropogenic manufacture of air is of incalculable importance. Curiously, however,urban air remains remarkably neglected within the political–ecological literatures. Accord-ingly, this paper suggests a range of key themes, which a political ecology of urban air needsto address. These touch upon the links between global warming, urban heat-island effectsand killer urban heatwaves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; hori-zontal movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of ver-tical condominium structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterise air-conditionedurbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasinglyhot climates; the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments; and, finally, themanipulation of urban air through political violence.

Key words: urban air, political ecology, heat islands, air conditioning, air pollution

Introduction: manufactured air and the‘defencelessness of breathing’

‘At first we feel nothing, we are insensitive,we are naturalized. And then suddenly wefeel not something, but the absence ofsomething we did not know before couldpossibly be lacking. Think of the poorsoldiers on the front line, deep in theirtrenches, the 22nd of April 1915 near Ypres(Figure 1). They knew everything aboutbullets, shells, rats, death, mud, and fear—but air, they did not feel air, they justbreathed it.

And then, from this ugly, slow-moving,greenish cloud lingering over them, air isbeing removed. They begin to suffocate. Airhas entered the list of what could bewithdrawn from us. In the terms of thegreat German thinker Peter Sloterdijk, air

has been made explicit; air has beenreconfigured; it is now part of an air-conditioning system that makes our lifepossible.’ (Bruno Latour 2005, 104)

Humans, increasingly, manufacturetheir own air. For a species whichexpires without air in two or

three minutes—what Elias Canetti (1987,930) has called ‘defenselessness of breath-ing’—this anthropogenic manufacture ofair is of incalculable importance. Inescap-ably, ‘air constitutes an implicit conditionof existence’ (Sloterdijk 2009, 32).

The process of machinic manufacturehappens in a variety of related ways. On aplanetary scale, the earth’s atmospheric temp-erature and composition is now so radicallydifferent from what it was a few centuries

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ago that geologists are now pushing for thecontemporary period to carry an appropri-ately anthropomorphic moniker—the‘Anthropocene’—rather than the previous‘Holocene’ (the period since the retreat ofthe ice sheets around 12,000 years ago—seeBoschman 2014). Global climate change is aproduct of three centuries of rampanturban-industrial growth: between 70 and80% of all greenhouse gases now emanatefrom the world’s urban areas (Hodson andMarvin 2010).

In and around the three-dimensional aerialenvironments within and above these urbanregions, this manufacture of air reaches evengreater levels of intensity. Here, giant,warmed-up domes or ‘heat islands’, warmedby the city’s release of energy, the extra-high concentration of greenhouse gases (andother pollutants) that linger above cities,and the tendency of concrete and asphalt to

heavily absorb the sun’s heat, are systemati-cally filled with complex ‘cocktails’ of pollu-tants. These emerge from the energy-intensive activities that concentrate in andaround cities: power generation; industry;oil-based transportation, building use andso on.

As urbanisation intensifies and spreads, awide range of global health organisationsare asserting that these domes filled withwarmed-up cocktails of gases are becomingone of humanity’s greatest killers (seeOECD 2014; World Health Organization2014).

Startlingly, however, the politics and geo-graphies of bad or lethal air in cities remainremarkably peripheral to the huge growthof political–ecological work on the socialand technological productions of nature inurban environments that has in other waysbeen so productive in human geography and

Figure 1 ‘The insidious and deadly gas that creeps noiselessly down toward the foe.’ Contemporary depiction of a Ger-man gas attack on the Russian front in the First World War (Source: The Library of Congress ‘The War of the Nations: Port-folio in Rotogravure Etchings: Compiled from the Mid-Week Pictorial’ [New York: New York Times, 1919], 210. Publicdomain. At https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/6332015472/)

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critical urbanism over the past two decades(see Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw2006). This body of work, linked closely towider post-humanist and materialist shifts insocial theory and philosophy (Bennett2010), has successfully challenged conven-tional conceptions of the urban, and of theSociety/Nature binary. This literature positsurban processes as complex multi-scaledmetabolisms fundamentally integratingsocial, organic, ‘natural’ and technologicalagents into strung-out ‘cyborgian’, ‘socioeco-logical’ or ‘techno-natural’ complexes,assemblages or hybrids (with the latter con-cepts and terms varying between differentstrands of theorisation) (see Swyngedouw2006).

Resulting studies of such urban metaboli-sations of nature have successfully addressed,amongst other themes, water and sanitation(Kaika 2005); the politics of food (Heynen2006); the production of green space(Heynen, Perkins, and Roy 2006); theviolent political ecologies of oil and otherresources (Peluso and Watts 2001); or the col-lapse of urban infrastructures (Graham 2009)(for a recent review, see Heynen 2013).

It is notable, however, that despite thewider public discourses of air emergency inthe world’s cities, beyond a few initial ana-lyses, the political ecologies of urban airremain underdeveloped. ‘Technical’, depoli-ticised, medicalised, positivist, physical geo-graphic and public health policy discoursesstill overwhelmingly dominate the field.‘Urban political ecology research has so farbeen focused on natural resources for con-sumption, production, and recreation, ratherthan on environmental pollution’ (Veron2006, 2094). Raymond Bryant’s (1998, 89)diagnoses over 15 years ago that ‘the existingliterature [on changing air quality] is largelydevoid of political analysis’—a problemwhich inevitably works to obfuscate theways in which ‘unequal power relations are“inscribed” in the air’—retain power today.1

A few innovative interventions, motivatedby this wider neglect, have made usefulstarts. Michael Buzzelli (2008) developed a

political–ecological discussion of the chal-lenges of the multi-scaled nature of air pol-lution for air pollution monitoring inVancouver. Janice Harper (2004) blendedpolitical–ecological theory with medicalanthropological ideas to present a searing eth-nography of the stark air pollution andasthma crises in Houston. In addition, ReneVeron (2006) built an innovative analysisexploring the growing power of elites’ bour-geois-environmentalist ideas emphasising thebeautification of Delhi as a ‘world city’, inshaping pollution monitoring in the city.Ostensible efforts by governmental elites to‘clean up’ urban air in Delhi, Veron shows,thus amount to a deeply revanchist pro-gramme to remove the poor, along withtheir vehicles and informal communities,which they deem not to befit to ‘purified’environments of this sanitised urban vision.

Such analyses, however, remain sporadicand occasional; the contrast with theburgeoning literatures on the political ecol-ogies of urban water is sharp. Erik Swynge-douw and Nik Heynen’s emphasis over adecade ago on major metropolitan regionsas socio-natural and techno-natural com-plexes within multi-scaled political ecologiesthrough which dangerous and bad air isproduced and shifted, has yet to move suchprocesses to the centre of critical geographicanalysis. ‘The cars burning fuels fromdistant oil-deposits and pumping CO2 intothe air, affecting people, forests, climates,and geopolitical conditions around theglobe,’ they wrote, ‘further complete theglobal geographic mappings and traces thatflow through the urban and “produce”London as a palimpsest of densely layeredbodily, local, national and global—butdepressingly uneven geographically—socioe-cological processes’ (Swyngedouw andHeynen 2003, 899).

More broadly, whilst the innovative workof German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk(2005, 2009) on the histories of deadly air inwarfare, climate change and geoengineeringis having a major influence, environmentalanthropologist Tim Choy asserts that air

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still remains peripheral to social theorisation.‘Air matters too little in social theory’, hewrites.

‘Aside from signifying a loss of grounding, airis as taken for granted in theory as it is in mostof our daily breaths. [ . . . ] Air is left to drift[ . . . ] neither theorized nor examined, takensimply as solidity’s lack. There seems atfirst to be no reason not to let it.’ (Choy 2010,9–11)

Such a neglect seems especially paradoxicalgiven wider recent shifts in the social theoris-ation of urbanism and urbanisation towardsan emphasis on a Lefebvrian process of plane-tary urbanisation (Brenner 2013); a preoccu-pation with the urban dimensions of globalclimate change and the unsurprisingly hugecontribution of urban-industrial centres togreenhouse gas emissions (Hodson andMarvin 2010); a growing recognition of thevolumetric and vertical aspects of politicsand geopolitics (Elden 2013); and the widercultural geographies, affective atmospheresand histories of urban air (Anderson andHolden 2008; Martin 2011; Adey 2013).

Much work thus remains to be done toexplicate the political ecologies and politicsof the materiality of urban air in the contextof rapid urbanisation and global climatechange. Such a project needs to make explicitthe systematic anthropogenic and machinicmanufacture and material conditioning ofboth ‘good’ and ‘bad’ air, through design,technoscience, capitalist industrialism, mili-tarism, warfare, commodification, consumer-ism and so forth. In a context of planetaryurbanisation, unprecedented pollution andpublic health crises, rising social inequalitiesand rapid anthropogenic climate change, air,in other words, needs to be wrenchedfinally and fully from any lingering post-Enlightenment categories of its givenness asa ‘public’ good within a ‘Nature’ that is exter-nal to the socio-technical worlds and pro-cesses of urban life. As Bruno Latour hasemphasised so elegantly, Sloterdijk’s workhammers home the enormous stakes that sur-round the essential technopolitics of a species

inhabiting environments of increasingly man-ufactured and ‘conditioned’ air. ‘This is Slo-terdijk’s explicitness’, he writes:

‘You are on life support, it’s fragile, it’stechnical, it’s public, it’s political, it couldbreak down—it is breaking down—it’s beingfixed, you are not too confident of those whofix it. Our current condition merely relies onour more explicit understanding that thistentative technological system, this “lifesupport”, entails the whole planet—even itsatmosphere.’ (Latour 2005, 104)

With such an apparent gap between globalpublic heath crises and analytical neglect,this unusually broad review paper seeks tohelp shift the politics and political–ecologicalmaterialities of urban air from the margins tothe centre of critical urban social science. Toachieve this, it undertakes an internationaland multi-scaled review of the multipledimensions of the politics of contemporaryurban air, discussions of which tend conven-tionally to be separated within the highly‘siloed’ discourses of separated academicand policy communities. Through an inter-disciplinary synthesis, the paper’s aim is toblend insights from recent research inhuman geography, urban studies, urbandesign, architecture, environmental soci-ology, climatology, social policy, publicheath, epidemiology, political theory andphilosophy around a series of key, cross-cutting thematic vignettes. The aim here,then, is to use such a synthesis to add momen-tum to an already discernible ‘turn’ towardsthe critical social scientific and architecturalanalysis of air (see Adey 2013, 2014; Gissen2013) and to further the incorporation ofurban air (and its politics) into urban socialtheory.

Accordingly, what follows is structuredaround 10 suggested themes, to which, Ifeel, a political ecology of urban air shouldattend. These address, in turn, the linksbetween global warming, urban heat-islandeffects and killer urban heatwaves; urbanpollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pol-lution; horizontal movements of polluted

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air; the vertical politics of urban air; theconstruction of vertical condominium struc-tures for elites; the vicious circles that charac-terise air-conditioned urbanism; heat-relateddeaths of workers building air-conditionedstructures in increasingly hot climates; thegrowth of large-scale air-conditioned environ-ments; and, finally, the manipulation of urbanair through the actions of state militaries andsecurity forces through what Jacob Hamblin(2013) calls ‘catastrophic environmentalism’.

Heat islands and killer heatwaves

‘The U.S. Environmental Protection Agencyestimates that, between 1979 and 2003, heatexposure has caused more than the number ofmortalities resulting from hurricanes,lightning, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakescombined.’ (NASA 2010)

Turning to our first vignette, the well-known‘urban heat-island’ effect already mentioned

(see Lee 1984; Gartland 2010) means that theraised ambient air temperature at the core oflarge urban areas is usually at its highestduring clear, still nights, reaching tempera-tures which are between 3 and 108C higherthan those in surrounding areas (Figure 2).Such effects are important contributors toglobal warming as a whole. Although theirprecise contribution remains controversialamongst climatologists, the best recent evi-dence suggests that the extra heat given offby urban areas has contributed somethingbetween 15 and 21% of global warming as awhole over the past 150 years (as opposed togreenhouse gas emissions and other changes)(Hausfather and Menne 2013).

Recent research using remote sensingshows that urban heat islands can have evengreater effects than recent thought suggests:one major study in the USA in 2010showed that summer temperatures in themain cities in the north-east—Boston,New York, Philadelphia and Washington,

Figure 2 Typical urban heat-island effects in a US city by day and night (Source: NASA 2010).

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DC—were an average of 7–98C (13–168F)warmer than surrounding rural areas over athree-year period (NASA 2010).

As well as ameliorating cold winters, urbanheat islands can dramatically accentuate thelethal effects of hot summers within acontext of a warming planetary climate. Emer-gencies such as the Chicago heatwave in 1995and the European heatwave of 2003 (whichkilled around 70,000 largely elderly people)have dramatically revealed the ways in whichsystematic inequality, housing policies, poorurban design and hopelessly inadequate emer-gency response arrangements can combinetogether to allow urban heatwaves tobecome mass killers of the poor, the lonely,the old, the weak and the vulnerable. Epide-miological studies have shown that there is a‘significantly increased risk of hospitalizationfor multiple diseases, including cardiovasculardisease, ischemic heart disease, ischemicstroke, respiratory disease, pneumonia, dehy-dration, heatstroke, diabetes, and acute renalfailure, with a 108F increase in same-dayapparent temperature’ due to urban heatwaves(Ostro et al. 2010, 1053).

Current estimates suggest that average pla-netary temperatures rose between 0.5 and1.38C between 1951 and 2000 due to anthro-pogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Thesetemperatures, moreover, will inevitably risefurther by the end of the century bybetween 1.7 and 4.88C (depending on thedegree to which greenhouse gas emissionscan be reduced) (Johnson 2013). Given that,by 2100, the United Nations estimates thatthe world’s population will be between 11billion and 15 billion, and that fully 65–85% of that population will inhabit heat-island cities, primarily in tropical or semitro-pical locations, the future threat of majorurban heat emergencies seems an especiallydaunting one.

Worrying precedents already exist. In the1995 heatwave in Chicago, after a 48-hourperiod of daytime temperatures between 41and 438C, those without air conditioning,living near the black, bitumined roofs of thecity’s notorious public housing ‘projects’ on

the South Side, quite literally baked. Manywere too worried about the possibilities ofcrime to open their windows. Many whodid have air conditioning could not affordto turn it on because of high electricitycosts (power outages were also a majorproblem). By Friday, 14 July, as Eric Klinen-berg (2002a) recounts:

‘thousands of Chicagoans had developedsevere heat-related illnesses. Paramedicscouldn’t keep up with emergency calls, andcity hospitals were overwhelmed. Twenty-three hospitals—most on the South andSouthwest Sides—went on bypass status,closing the doors of their emergency rooms tonew patients. Some ambulance crews drovearound the city for miles looking for an openbed. Hundreds of victims never made it to ahospital. The most overcrowded place in thecity was the Cook County MedicalExaminer’s Office, where police transportedhundreds of bodies for autopsies.’ (seeKlinenberg 2002b)

By the end of the week, 739 people had diedbecause of the extreme heat (especially thelack of cooling at night). The patternmapped perfectly on to the geography ofpoverty: most victims were old, poor, iso-lated and male—they died alone. ElderlyAfrican-American men were statistically themost likely to die (Klinenberg 2002a).

The heat catastrophe across Europe in2003, which prematurely killed around70,000 people, similarly overly affected theold, the ill and the lonely living isolatedlives in major cities like Paris (where 4800such people, labelled the ‘Forgotten’ in theFrench media, lost their lives) (NASA2010). As in Chicago, the most lethal spaceswere marginal, poor quality apartments highup in the tenements beneath the dark,baking slate and bitumen of roofs. ‘Many ofthese forgotten victims lived in chambres debonne,’ Richard Keller (2013, 302) writes,‘the former domestic servants’ quartersunder the roofs of many of Paris’s buildingsthat are a legacy of Prefect Georges-EugeneHaussmann’s reconstruction of the city inthe nineteenth century.’

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Indeed, the deaths of the isolated, poor andold helped to expose the Janus-faced verticalarchitectures and geographies of Paris: asumptuous and burnished street-level facefor the bourgeoisie hiding an invisible, decre-pit (and dangerous) world of attic-living forthe poor. Richard Keller (2013, 302) exploredthe personal residences of the isolated and oldpeople who died in the heatwave (many ofwhom were buried, like victims of theChicago heatwave, in unattended funerals).Entering the street-level front door of theapparently wealthy East Side Haussmannianblock where one of the heatwave’s victimslived, he discovered that ‘it is actually twobuildings in one. A marble-lined entrywaygives access to the building concierge’s apart-ment, the elevator, a wide stair-case leading tothe main building’s apartments, and thecourtyard.’

The rear-side of the block, Keller (2013,307) found, by contrast, was ‘accessible onlyby a serpentine and decrepit service staircase.This side of the building houses the chambresde bonne, seven or eight such apartmentswith a common toilet and sink at one end ofthe hall.’ These apartments, hidden awayhigh up from view, raised up to the sun,were the killing zones in Paris’s 2003 heat-wave. They illustrated profoundly howheightening social inequalities, embodiedthrough the vertical complexities of physicalurban form, can dramatically affect the vul-nerabilities of marginalised populationsduring urban heat emergencies.

Urban heat islands have a further crucialelement: they dramatically increase theenergy available for violent weather eventswithin cities. Indeed, as cities sprawl intomegalopolitan urban regions, so weatherevents which derive from such energy arebecoming apparent.

A spate of violent tornadoes on the fringesof Istanbul in the hot summer of 2014,for example, were judged by meteorologistsas being the results of rapid urbanisation.Virtually unknown previously in theregion, they were generated by flows of hotair surrounding Istanbul’s extending and

intensifying heat island. ‘What weird oldgods of weather have Istanbul’s architectsaccidentally awoken?’, Geoff Manaugh(2014) wonders:

‘This conjures up frankly outrageous imagesof a city so sprawling—and so thermally ill-conceived—that huge masses of air atdifferent temperatures are now rising into thesky to do battle, violently colliding likemythological titans above the city to generatethe surreal tornadoes now ripping through theneighborhoods below. Weather might be thefuture of urban design.’

Toxic domes

‘Air . . . from Johannesburg to Tehran, toDelhi to Jakarta, isn’t about aesthetics, oreven possible climate change at some point inthe future: it’s about life and death now.’(Doyle and Risely 2008, 246)

As well as unliveable heat—and this is oursecond vignette—processes of urban-indus-trialisation systematically manufacturewhole environments where the ambient airis a basically toxic environment which killsmillions of people a year. Le Corbusier(1967) called the air of industrial cities,‘devil’s air’—and for good reason. The stat-istics here are even more startling than thosesurrounding urban heat emergencies: urbanair is killing urbanites at alarming rates.

Iconic episodes show that this is not new,of course. Indeed, deadly air pollution,rather than some simple ‘externality’, haslong been constitutive of modern urban-industrialism and its machinic landscapes(Horvath 1974; Veron 2006, 2096). Deadlyair is as old as urbanism itself (see Brimble-combe 2012), with coal-based urban energyoften creating the worst mortality. In 1952,in one iconic example, 13,000 people died ina three-month smog episode in London.The complex technoscience of weather fore-casting and pollution management, in fact,has been a major element within the emerginggovernmentalities of science, technology and

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the environment in modern states (see White-head 2011).

Recent studies within the epidemiologicaltraditions of positivist science estimate thatglobal death rates from air pollution arerising exponentially; toxic air now providesthe world’s biggest public health crisis. In2014, following new evidence that the stressesof polluted air are responsible for manydeaths through strokes and heart diseasesamongst physiologically stressed urbanites,the World Health Organization estimatedthat 7 million people were killed by air pol-lution globally in 2012. ‘The risks from airpollution are now far greater than previouslythought or understood, particularly for heartdisease and strokes’, argued Dr Maria Neira,Director of the World Health Organization’sDepartment for Public Health, Environ-mental and Social Determinants of Health.‘Few risks have a greater impact on globalhealth today than air pollution; the evidencesignals the need for concerted action toclean up the air we all breathe’ (WorldHealth Organization 2014). A total of 4.3million of the estimated deaths were due toindoor air pollution (mainly from lit stoves);3.7 million were due to bad external air.

When analysis takes into account the sec-ondary deaths through cardiovascular andpulmonary mortalities (especially emphy-sema and chronic bronchitis), one in eightof all human deaths were caused by bad airinside and outside (World Health Organiz-ation 2014). Children, the elderly, the poorand those with respiratory and heart pro-blems are dramatically over-represented inthis annual figure.

In China alone, air pollution, largely fromthe cars and industries in and around cities,is estimated to kill over 1.2 million peopleprematurely per year. (The combination ofmass automobilisation, extreme reliance oncoal and particulate-producing diesel fuel,and rapid industrialisation make Chinesecities the most polluted in the world.)(Environmental Technology 2013).

In India, meanwhile, epidemiologists esti-mate that 620,000 people die prematurely

each year through the effects of urban air pol-lution (Economic Times 2013). This figure isgrowing rapidly as the country urbanisesand automobilises at very fast rates. Of 180Indian cities monitored for sulphur dioxide,nitrogen dioxide and suspended particlematter, only two—Malappuram and Patta-namthitta in Kerala—met the World HealthOrganization’s rather generous criteria of‘acceptable’ pollution in 2012.2

Atmospheric dust thrown up by dieselengines, coal-burning power stations andindustry—‘particulate matter’—is the singlebiggest killer within the toxic domes abovecities: this literally asphyxiates urbanitesthrough cancers, lung disease and asthma.(The widespread shift to diesel engines,ostensibly driven by ‘green’ agendas, hasoften been catastrophic for public health.)‘By 2050, there could be 3.6 million prema-ture deaths a year from exposure to particu-late matter, most of them in China andIndia’, a recent report by the OECD (2014)estimates. Chilling epidemiological recordsand surprises are continually emerging here:in November 2013, an eight-year-old girlliving adjacent to one of Beijing’s massive fly-overs became the youngest person ever to bediagnosed with lung cancer (Duggan 2013;for wider research on air pollution andasthma crises in urban neighbourhoods, seeCorburn, Osleeb, and Porter 2006).

Toxic urban atmospheres are especiallylethal in cities that are hemmed-in by moun-tains or other natural features; where concen-trations of particularly dirty polluters aremost intense; and during stable anticyclonicepisodes where air fails to rise or get blownaway and lingers for days and even weeks.It is now common for health authorities inmajor cities—Beijing, Lagos, Santiago,Mexico City, Kathmandu, Sao Paulo, Cairo,Jakarta, Athens are only some of the mostnotorious examples—to declare states ofemergency during such situations. Millionsof vehicles are forced off the roads; the mostpolluting industries are shut down; popu-lations, especially the most vulnerable, areurged to stay indoors until the smog clears.

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Architect Albert Pope (2013), invokingPeter Sloterdijk’s (2009) work on the weaponi-sation of air through lethal gas attacks in warand terrorism, wonders if such crises, ineffect, work as what Sloterdijk calls ‘air-quakes’. ‘Can a set of ontological rights—such as breathing—actually challenge or evendisplace economic hegemony?’, he asks. Tohim, the unbearable urban air within manyChinese cities works to ‘brings the elementsof our life-world out of a background ofneglect and foregrounds them as the ontologi-cal preconditions of human existence’.

Pollution paradoxes

‘Smouldering away, the megacity’s atmosphereslend a definite aura.’ (Adey 2013, 2)

Third, toxic urban air works to interrupt theefforts of city agencies to entrepreneuriallybrand and market their cities as blue-skiedand fragrant-aired destinations for tourists,conferences, film locations, investmentflows and, above all, sporting mega-events.

The authoritarian regime in Beijing—a citythat pumps out more particulate matter thanPortugal (Adey 2013, 7) and adds 400,000cars to its roads every year—workedespecially hard to re-engineer the city’s airfor the 2008 Olympics by forcing traffic offthe road and closing factories. Whilst thepopulation’s health dramatically improved,the reversion to previous levels of transport,energy generation and industrial productionimmediately after the Games reintroducedthe downward spiral.

Indeed, by the end of 2013, the extremepollution in Beijing and other big Chinesecities meant that airline pilots were beinginstructed on how to land in smog. Thecrisis was so bad that the country’s officialmedia was reduced to releasing bizarre plati-tudes that the pollution meant that thepeople’s ‘knowledge of meteorology, geogra-phy, physics, chemistry and history [had]progressed’. Blankets of killer smog werealso invoked as a geopolitical, defensive

shield against the prying weapons ofunknown enemies. ‘Smog may affectpeople’s health and daily lives’, the announ-cer admitted. ‘But on the battlefield it canserve as a defensive advantage in militaryoperations’ (Kalman 2013).

Pollution paradoxes can sometimes inter-rupt apparently inexorable logics of urbanwarming. In a particularly prolonged smogevent in February 2014, Chinese scientistswarned that the smog blanketing the Beijingregion was becoming so bad that its effectswere starting to resemble those of nuclearwinters, creating a city almost ‘uninhabitablefor human beings’. Densities of suspendedparticles hit concentrations over 20 timesmaximum limits recommended by theWorld Health Organization. Photosynthesisrates in agricultural crops in the green-house-based systems within Beijing’s hinter-land were halved. Architectures to boostfood production for teeming cities at thelocal, ground-level scale will always proveto be no match for the human manufactureof toxic, and increasingly opaque, urbanatmospheres (Kalman 2014).

In Hong Kong, meanwhile, in the year2000, a priority of economic developmentauthorities was to tempt the Walt DisneyCorporation to build a theme park there.They were nearly unsuccessful because theCorporation felt that the city’s notoriouslybad winter air pollution ‘did not mesh par-ticularly well with the family image thatDisney so prided itself on cultivating’(Choy 2010, 6). (Deep ironies lurk here ofcourse: Los Angeles, the location ofDisney’s headquarters, has suffered episodesof catastrophic smog for decades.)

Echoing the complex simulations of pol-lution-free urbanism choreographed2000 miles further north in Beijing, touristmanagers in Hong Kong now routinelyerect blue-skied panoramas next to theiconic city viewpoints when pollution epi-sodes obscure the skyline and harbour withwhat the International Business Times calleda ‘steamy sauna of humidity and noxiousair’ (FlorCruz 2013) (see Figure 3).

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Not surprisingly, urban tourism econom-ies are especially vulnerable to toxic urbanair. Urban pollution crises in China in late2013 saw domestic and international visitornumbers to iconic sites such as Beijing’s For-bidden City drop by 75%. Chinese insurancecompanies even introduced travel insurancepackages covering smog events to try andbolster bookings (Coldwell 2014).

However, immersion in megacity air leadsto more than health hazards, environmentalinjustice and problems for place marketersand tourists. As in the smoke-filled industrialcities of 19th-century Europe, these airs alsoinevitably shape the atmospheric, aestheticand affective experiences of place (see Adey2014). These relationships, too, are oftenparadoxical: as Turner found whenpainting the startling sunsets generated bymajor global volcanic events in the 1880s,toxic air can generate its own sublime urbanbeauty.

In cities like Shanghai (Figure 4), the com-bination of rising vertical towers and theworsening state of city air creates its own aes-thetic connection: the view of the smog-filledlower atmospheres from tower residentsabove. Giuditata Vendrame, an Italian wholived for 11 months on the 17th floor of agleaming new tower in central Shanghai,recalls that the thickening haze of the city’s

polluted air ‘often imbue[d] the city with aparticular sense of lightness, suspension andfragility’. The foggy air, in turn, softenedher view of the city’s burgeoning forest ofconcrete, skyscraping towers. ‘The citygains visual and architectural qualities’, shewrites. ‘The light of the sunbeams penetratesthis foggy layer, giving the city a magic andfairytale colour. However, this “magicalhaze” is harmful. It is smog, air pollution’(Vendrame 2012).

Downwind

Fourth, the uneven distribution of bad airworks horizontally, too. Less urbanisedareas downwind of major metropolitan for-mations breathe the filth of the city theymay never visit. Such downwind vulnerabil-ities are especially lethal after chemical spills(as at Bhopal in 1984 which has killed up to16,000 people) or when they become radio-active due to atmospheric nuclear testing ornuclear catastrophes like those at Chernobyland Fukushima. Less often, it is cities thatare downwind from bad air generated byrural conflagrations: ‘Singapore frequentlycomplains of the extreme haze caused bySumatran forest fires in Indonesia’ (Adey2013, 10).

Figure 3 Smog and simulacrum: the fake skyline erected for tourist use in Hong Kong in 2013 (Source: http://imgur.com/VaZU3lU. Photo: Pirapira Pelar [Attribution licence]).

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At a planetary scale, the relative (althoughoften chimerical) cleaning up of the airscapesabove European, Japanese or NorthAmerican cities has been achieved partlythrough a massive geo-economic shift acrossthe horizontal terrain of the earth’s surface:the huge and filthy extractive and manufac-turing complexes that sustain these cities’places within global divisions of labour arenow strung out across China, East andSouth-east Asia, Africa, Latin America andeven Australia.

A major report of the IntergovernmentalPanel on Climate Change in 2013 concludedthat such wholesale offshoring between theWest and East Asia was the key reasonthat global emissions of carbon dioxide andthe other greenhouse gases increased twiceas fast between 2000 and 2010 as they didduring the previous three decades. Thiswas because of the huge growth of manufac-turing capacity powered by electricity gen-erated from dirty coal-burning powerstations. ‘A growing share of CO2 emissionsfrom fossil fuel combustion in developingcountries,’ the report concluded, ‘is releasedin the production of goods and servicesexported, notably from upper-middle-

income countries to high-income countries’(cited in Goldenberg 2014).

The circulations of the global atmosphere,however, mean that even horizontal outsour-cing and the offspring of bad air across trans-continental horizontal scales fails to offer acomplete insulation from bad air: a recentstudy found that between 12 and 24% ofthe sulphur pollutants in the western USAhad been blown there from industrial andurban sites in China by atmospheric windsystems (Walker 2014).

Airy refuges, human sinks

‘One can [ . . . ] discern a political–economicgeography of air.’ (Choy 2010, 26)

Fifth, in all cities, the impacts of toxic andwarmed-up aerial domes are distributedextremely unevenly and unjustly. Whilstatmospheric pollution can be a great levellerin terms of wealth and class, generally,wealthy and elite groups are able to insulatethemselves from its effects more effectivelythan are poor or marginalised ones. Here athree-dimensional cat and mouse game of

Figure 4 Air pollution in Shanghai, 2013 (Source: http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId¼12866901&searchId¼3aab0a4b8063f9a9a1d8039a05475e22&npos¼27. Photo: Fung Leo [Attributionlicence]).

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environmental injustice is wrought out assystems of linked, ‘capsular’ spaces such ascondominiums and penthouses, malls, officecomplexes and upmarket cars are constructedwhich offer air conditioning (whilst pumpingtheir heat straight to hose immediatelyoutside) (see De Cauter 2005). Air-con-ditioned cars, often flitting across the citys-cape on raised flyovers, dump their heat,noise and carcinogens straight onto the rela-tively impoverished communities that suchso often structures bisect. (At the same time,their cool interiors make worsening trafficmore bearable for their occupants.) Commu-nities adjacent to highways and flyovers havebeen shown to have dramatically higher deathrates due to asthma and other pollution-related diseases than those further awayfrom highways. ‘Residential proximity tofreeways is associated with uncontrolledasthma’ (Huynh et al. 2010).

The damaging impacts of auto exhaustemissions were one of the motivations ofmodernist architects like Le Corbusier toadvocate the destruction of traditionalstreets and the mass housing of urban popu-lations into raised towers (see Gissen 2013,3). Cars, meanwhile, would traverse the cityon freeways surrounded by buffer zones ofpollution-absorbing greenery. These days,however, mass modernist housing pro-grammes are mostly in abeyance—withoccasional exceptions such as Singapore.The colonisation of (air-conditioned) verticalspace is now largely an elite programme—athree-dimensional rising up of the powerfuland wealthy bound up with the neo-liberaland revanchist re-engineering of entire citys-capes largely for their needs. As elites inmany cities literally rise up into gated, air-conditioned, vertical communities and tall,climate-controlled workplace towers, sothey work to escape both the din of urbanlife and the pressing heat and pollution ofthe hotter urban surface.

Such vertical geographies of environmentalinjustice tend to be exaggerated where citiesare built on mountainous terrain. Ascendingup the proliferating skyscrapers in the world’s

most vertical city—Hong Kong—anthropolo-gist Tim Choy (2010, 29) is struck that ‘therich have access to good air while the poorare relegated to the dregs, to the smog anddust under flyovers or on the streets’.

Elite expatriates, for example, can seekrefuge from bad air, noise, heat and humidityby colonising what he calls Hong Kong’s‘airy refuges’—in skyscraper penthouseslocated in the topographic heights of thePeak or Midlevels. Just above the teemingstreet, meanwhile, covered, extending, air-con-ditioned escalator systems snake to connectarchipelagos of elite spaces of consumption,work and leisure. ‘Much of Hong Kongseems designed to get off the ground—intothe air, and out of it’ (Choy 2010, 12). Thesedynamics add to and layer over the long-stand-ing traditions of elites to inhabit exurban ormountainous locations to escape the worst ofthe environmental toxins, pollutions and temp-eratures within the toxic domes above cities.(Classic urban geography also dictates that,often, such processes of elite exurbanisationwere often orchestrated upwind of the mainmetropolitan centre.)

Hong Kong offers a startling system of ver-tically raised walkways snaking between thehuge, raised podium structures at the basesof upmarket hotels, residential blocks andmalls and corporate enclaves (Figure 5).Such systems can literally allow those whohave access, to inhabit the kind of raised-up,premium accommodation and mobilitysystems so beloved of science-fiction writers.

Continuing his discussions of walking inHong Kong, Choy (2010, 12) talks of a dayspent in the company of an executive fromthe Tsing Tao beer company as he ‘wendshis way expertly through Wenchai, a govern-ment and nightlife district on Hong KongIsland, without ever touching the ground’.Because the city’s deep, canyon-like streetsand long podium structures at the base oftowers act to channel and contain relativelyheavy polluted air, this has crucial impactson the relative health of the vertically strati-fied population. ‘In the typical streetcanyons of Hong Kong, air pollutants tend

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to be trapped in the bottom 15 m’ (Wong,Ng, and Yau 2012, 14). Moreover, themassive podium blocks between the streetsand the raised walkways in Hong Kong ‘notonly block most of the wind to pedestrians(affecting comfort and air quality), but alsominimise the “air volume” near the ped-estrian level (affecting air quality)’ (Ng 2009).

Splintering air: vertical architectures as‘spatialised immune systems’

‘An analysis of air reveals who belongs andwho does not, who is deserving and who isnot in a constellation of megacity inequality.’(Adey 2013, 4)

‘One could [ . . . ] lament the splintering of theatmosphere.’ (Canetti 1987, 10)

Political ecologies of urban air thus need toaddress the conditioning of air within interiorspaces (for recent progress here, see Biehlerand Simon 2011). The layered politics of

urban atmospheres—our sixth theme—isnot lost on real estate agents and developerswho build, design and market the world’svertical gated communities. ‘The HigherYou Go, the Cooler You Get!’ screams theadvertising hoarding at the elite IndiabullsSky Complex in Mumbai’s central businessdistrict (Figure 6).

Perhaps the ultimate capsular or ‘splin-tered’ living environment (Graham andMarvin 2001; De Cauter 2005), the build-ing—marketed under the banner ‘way, wayabove the rest’—offers a litany of elite,luxury services, a suite of pools, spas and res-taurants (all in the relatively cool air abovethe 12th floor; below these is a tall podiumof stacked parking garages). In addition,there is private rooftop helipad, and acomplex system of air conditioning and pol-lution filtering. In effect, the Sky Complex,like other elite residential towers, works tooffer what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk(2009) has termed as a ‘spatialized immunesystem’ lifting elites above the bad air andheat—as well as the dense populations ofpoorer people—of the grounded city below.

Exploiting the deep etymological and cos-mographic connections between height,status and power, the developer of Indiabulls,moreover, urges its customers to ‘soar higher’to embrace ‘a lifestyle unprecedented and

Figure 5 Raised walkway systems, Central, Hong Kong(Photo: Stephen Graham).

Figure 6 ‘The higher you go, the cooler you get!’ Pla-cards around the Indiabulls ‘Sky’ residential tower indowntown Mumbai, 2011 (Photo: Adam Cooper, repro-duced with permission).

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elevated up to the sky’. On the placardaround the corner, vertical height is equatednot just with premium atmosphere but witha direct invocation of theological supremacyfor the elites lucky enough to ascend thetower. ‘Consider it a blessing’, it shouts, ‘toshare the same address as God.’ ‘Where theheavens extend an invitation’ is the straplineof the development’s brochure.

Fragmenting atmospheres: vicious circlesof the air-con city

‘But where is Utopia, where the weather is64.48F . . . ?’ (Le Corbusier 1967, 42)

‘Air conditioning [is] now considered asnatural as the air itself.’ (Cox 2010, xi)

Seventh, an urban political ecology of air mustaddress the widening and increasingly ambi-tious processes through which air is deliber-ately manufactured and conditioned.Expected to almost double between 2012 and2018—from USD 98.2 billion to 178.4 billionin 2018—the global air-conditioning industryis in bonanza mode (Transparency MarketResearch 2013). Urbanisation, urban heat-island effects and the very warming of theplanet, combined with the ubiquity of consu-mer capitalism, provide a perfect marketenvironment for an industry which offers thepromise of manufacturing what Peter Sloter-dijk (2009, 94) has called ‘thematized’ or‘designed air’. ‘The breaking up of the socialworld into spaces of moral interdependenceinaccessible to one another,’ he suggests, ‘isanalogous to the micro-climatic fragmentingof the atmosphere’ (Sloterdijk 2009, 99).

The widespread normalisation of expec-tations amongst middle-class and wealthyurbanites in warmer cities that urban lifemust consist of a continuous experience ofchilled air manufactured to cover every build-ing or transport choice, adds further to the10% per annum market global growth rate(Transparency Market Research 2013). Thegrowing normalisation of air-con urbanismin hot climates like the southern USA has

been paralleled by major architectural,social and geo-economic shifts: the iconic‘rustbelt’ to ‘sunbelt’ transformation (seeCox 2010). ‘By 1960, 20 per cent of homesin the South owned an air conditioner’,writes Pete Adey (2014):

‘by 1973 80 per cent of [US] cars had airconditioning, as it became felt as an almostlegal right. However, this also contributed toa massive shift in population density [in thesouthern states] which almost doubled frombetween 1930 to 1980 due to decliningmortality, and, interestingly, new routines oftravel and migration to the “sun belt”. The1970 census was dubbed the “air conditionedcensus” by the New York Times because itcaptured the evolving effect of the technologyin creating attractive and comfortable climatesin the South, even in the summer.’ (156)

Many other nations have followed the USpath towards mass air-con use. Overwhel-mingly, such processes are organisedthrough individualised market forces distri-buting personal machines as consumer dur-ables. Such transformations are reflectedstrikingly in urban landscapes in many mega-cities where large buildings gradually becomestrewn with walls of individual air condi-tioners (Figure 7).

The laws of physics, of course, mean thatheat removed from the cooled, bubble-like,air-conned enclosures for the more privilegedcannot disappear. It must, instead, be dumpedbeyond the walls. The proliferation of air-conditioned environments thus leads togreater amounts of heat dumping via theheat exchangers on the frontages of the build-ings. (Anyone who has stood next to theextracted air next to the air-con outlet of amajor mall, hotel or office complex in a hotcity can testify to the fan oven-like experi-ence.) Stan Cox (2010, 31) observes that:

‘on hot summer days in the cities and townsof southern Europe, heat exhausted fromroom air conditioners becomes trappedbetween the multistory buildings that line theregion’s narrow, picturesque streets. The air-

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conditioning units raise the temperature ofthe already-hot outdoor air surrounding themby 108(F), forcing compressors and fans torun almost constantly, consuming even moreelectricity in order to flush heat out of homesand shops.’

Such external heat dumping further exacer-bates both urban heat-island effects(Figure 8) and the intolerable temperaturesof the wider street environment. This, inturn, adds to the increasingly desperate urgeby those who can afford it to find refugewithin an air-conditioned environment. Andso the cycle goes on: more air con, moreheat dumping on streets, and ever-greatertemperature disjunctures between the streetand building interiors, etc. And all toproduce ‘building-machines’ which, as thewidespread problems of ‘sick building’

syndrome demonstrate, themselves oftenprove profoundly unhealthy (Murphy 2006).

Research on the 2003 heat emergency inParis by Cecile de Munck, of the FrenchCentre for Meteorological Research, suggeststhat ramped up air-con use in the city exacer-bated the problem. Here ‘modeling exper-iments show that excess heat expelled ontothe streets because of increased air condi-tioner usage during heat waves can elevateoutside street temperatures significantly’(see Figure 8). Notably, this exacerbation ofheat-island effects is most powerful in thedensely built and largely affluent districtswithin the centre of Paris—places where aircon has been most widely installed andwhere running costs are not a problem(quoted in NASA 2010).

A second vicious circle for air-con citiesinvolves the pressure of the peaks of electri-city demand created by urban air-consystems leading to major power blackouts(see Graham 2009). Behind the unprece-dented blackout across the megalopolitannorth-eastern USA on 14 August 2003—themost powerful example thus far—‘lay apower system overloaded by summerenergy use, and in particular, dragged downby the burden of air conditioning’ (Grabar2013).

In 2013, air con accounted for 10% ofglobal electricity demand—a figure that,with 38 of the world’s 50 biggest citiesbeing in the tropics, is rising fast (Grabar2013). Such growth rates force the use ofextra fossil fuels for electricity generation,related threats to energy security, the releaseof more particulate matter and greenhousegases, and the increased risk of major poweroutages.

Again, the vicious circle here seemsinexorable: more air conditioning, exaggeratedclimate-change-related temperature rises,increasingly intolerable urban heat islands,further demands for air-con environmentsand so on. ‘Turning buildings intorefrigerators burns fossil fuels, which emitsgreenhouse gases, which raises global temp-eratures, which creates a need for—you

Figure 7 The new Great Wall of China? Individual air-con units cover this tower in Fuzhou, China, so densely thatit has become one of the most famous structures in the cityand is even a tourist attraction (Source: http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/most-awesome-wall-of-air-conditioners-in-fuzhou.html. Photo: Steve Levenstein).

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guessed it—more air-conditioning’ (Hutchin-son 2010).

Such feedback loops add further to the vul-nerabilities that marginalised urban groups,who have no choice but to endure urbanheat islands without air conditioning, face.Detailed research of heat emergencies demon-strates clearly that ‘ownership and usage ofair-conditioners significantly reduce[s] theeffects of temperature’ on the wide range ofconditions, diseases and ailments that canbecome killers during urban heatwaves(Ostro et al. 2010, 1053).

The lessons of the killer heat emergencies inChicago in 1995 and across Europe in 2003discussed above are again deeply relevanthere. There remains a startling absence ofpublic policies to systematically organise thedelivery of adequately cool environments forthe city’s poor within rapidly warming citiesfaced by dramatic rises in consumer electricitycosts (on the Australian case, see Farbotko andWaitt 2011).

In such a situation, market-based distri-bution of life-saving bubbles of coolness canonly work to kill increasing numbers of theold, the poor, the weak and the ill. Many arenow arguing that the inevitable failure ofmarkets to deliver socially just coolingmirror the failure of markets for many other‘public’ goods. Learning from cities like

Hartford, Connecticut, for example, HenryGrabar (2013) argues that public, municipalinfrastructures for cooling air are essential totackle both urban heat crises and the contri-bution of individualised air-con markets totoxic air (after all, many North Americancities have long traditions of organising collec-tive heat, steam and electricity infrastructures).

Many designers are also calling for a redis-covery of design-based solutions to coolingbuildings and for a return to altering thechoreographies of everyday and businesslives to deal with hot weather (see, e.g.Gandy 2010).

Hot bodies, cooled bodies: citadels of deathand apartheid atmospheres

‘As many people are killed on constructionsites throughout the world each year as die asa result of armed conflict.’ (NationalExamination Board in Occupational Safetyand Health, n.d.)

If the increasingly hot, urban world can bestarkly divided between those who are insideair-con environments and those who areoutside, the massive construction of a wholesuite of vast air-conditioned hotels, malls,leisure attractions and even football stadia byarmies of near-slave labourers within the

Figure 8 Calculations of the effect of heat dumping from air conditioning on the killer heatwave and heat island duringthe 2003 emergency in Paris. The ‘Real AC’ graph shows the actual heat-island profile for the city with air conditioning, the‘No AC’ graph is an estimated profile of the city were there to be no air conditioning at all (Source: NASA 2010).

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50-degree temperatures of Qatar—our eighththeme—is the lethal apogee of such injustice.

Two million indentured labourers fromNepal, Pakistan, India and the rest of Southand South-east Asia, are constructing theseedifices in a $140 billion programme toready to enclave for the 2022 World Cup.The International Trade Union Confedera-tion has warned that 4000 constructionworkers are likely to die before the start ofthe tournament; at least 185 Nepalis—whomake up a sixth of the migrant workforce—died in 2013 alone (Gibson and Pattison2014). Over 500 Indian workers—between20 and 30 a month—died between 2012 and2014 (Gibson 2014).

Heatstroke and dehydration are the mainkillers, especially during the summermonths (although fatal ‘accidents’ andsuicides are also routine). Most death certifi-cates are marked with the catchall of ‘natural’‘cardiac arrest’ by Qatari doctors. Thisdeflects attention from the lethal workingenvironment that is the real cause of suchhuge death rates. The dark irony is that,when opened, the entire archipelago ofbubble-like visitor spaces—including, theQatari government claim, five new and oneextended stadia—will be air-conditioned.

The Qatar example, however, is only themost visible of many: the wider constructionof a series of what Davis and Monk (2009)termed ‘dreamworld of neoliberalism’—inDubai and Bahrain, most notably—havebeen achieved at the expense of unknowablenumbers of heat-related deaths amongstnear-slave migrant workers. After the UK’sshadow sports minister, Clive Efford,expressed revulsion at the latest revelationsof worker deaths in Qatar, Maher Mughrabi(2013) wondered:

‘Where exactly has this man been? Dubai,Qatar and Bahrain have been hosting the starsof golf, tennis, snooker, formula one and, ofcourse, horse racing for decades now. And allthose holidaymakers in Dubai who havesampled the shopping festival, the mall withthe indoor ski slope or zooming up in the lift

of the world’s tallest building should alsoknow that all this was built through the samesystem of labour that is suddenly soappalling.’

‘During the summer, temperatures soarabove 45 Celsius (113 Fahrenheit), and visi-tors are advised to walk outdoors only inthe evening, and drink water continually’,writes Richard Abernethy (2010). ‘Heatstroke is a killer for workers doing heavyphysical labour for shifts of 12 hours orlonger.’ Human Rights Watch (2006)(Figure 9) cite a report from the journal Con-struction Week that found that 880 migrantconstruction workers died in the UAE(United Arab Emirates) in 2004 alone. TheIndian consulate, moreover, registered thedeaths of 971 Indian citizens in 2005. Sixty-one of these were registered as site accidents;many were of heatstroke and heat exhaustion;suicides made up the remainder. The reportfound that ‘as many as 5000 constructionworkers per month were brought into theaccident and emergency department ofRashid Hospital in Dubai during Julyand August 2004’ (Human Rights Watch2006).

Journalist Nesrine Malik (2011), visitingDubai to research the deaths of migrantworkers, found that conditions for Indianworkers building Dubai’s air-conditionedskyscrapers and megaprojects were so appal-ling that two committed suicide each week.(The first suicide from the world’s tallesttower, the Burj Khalifa, another Indianmigrant worker, happened when she wasthere. Locals joked callously that the deathhad ‘inaugurated the building’ as a suicideplatform, such is the frequency of suicideleaps [Malik 2011].)

Climate capsules: echoes of BuckminsterFuller

‘The air starts to become private.’ (Vendrame2012)

‘Let us not forget that today’s so-calledconsumer society was invented in a

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greenhouse—in the very same glass-canopied,nineteenth century arcades in which the firstgeneration of “experience customers” learnedto breathe the intoxicating scent of anenclosed, interior-world full of commodities.’(Dorrian 2012, 27)

Relatedly, an urban political ecology of airmust attend, penultimately, to the prolifer-ation of air-conditioned environments at themacro scale. Increasingly megalomaniacaluse of air-conditioned interiors has beencentral, for example, to Dubai’s spectacularemergence as the ultimate dreamworld ofneo-liberalism. Reaching its extreme withthe conceit of a complete, indoor, skiingenvironment, with real snow, in the middleof one of the world’s hottest deserts

(Figure 10), Dubai’s archipelago of air-con-ditioned interior ‘experiences’ each enjoys awholly manufactured climate (a project fora much larger, so far unbuilt, ‘Arctic experi-ence’, is to include real polar bears)(Dorrian 2012).

Dubai’s interior ski spaces—the ultimateinteriorisation of ‘nature’—echoes architectBuckminster Fuller’s influential ruminationsbetween the 1940s and 1960s on the possibili-ties of dome-like constructions at variousscales within which urban air could be preciselycontrolled. (Famously, Fuller even suggested agiant dome encompassing midtown Manhattanwhich would permanently sustain what hecalled a ‘Garden of Eden climate’—seeKrausse and Kichtenstein 2001.)

Figure 9 Human Rights Watch’s 2006 report of worker deaths building air-conditioned complexes in the USA (Source:Human Rights Watch 2006).

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To Mark Dorrian (2012, 26), Dubai’s cap-sular, air-conditioned interiors echo Fuller’sgeodesic domes, with their ‘complex conno-tations of autonomy, encapsulation, andworld imagery’. Here, though, the techno-utopia of constructing bubbles for theprecise manipulation of urban air—what hecalls a ‘renovated atmosphere’ (Dorrian2012)—rests, with deep paradox, of thebodies of unknowable labourers whoexpired through heat exhaustion in theirefforts to project the facade.

The juxtaposition of interiorised simulacraof ‘nature’ unleashes less lethal paradoxes.The interior condition within ‘bubble’environments like Dubai ski-domeemerges ‘more pure, less polluted, and hencemore “itself” than in the world beyond,albeit now as commodity’ (Dorrian 2012, 26).

Crises of air pollution are also drivingurban elites to engineer capsules of filtered,good-quality air from the wider urbanenvironment. In the most powerful exampleso far, governors of Beijing’s InternationalSchool for elite, expat children have spent$5 million housing their previously outdoorplaygrounds and sports spaces within agiant dome. This allows the air breathed by

the school’s children to be filtered to a veryhigh standard by powerful industrial airfilters that control the interior’s relationshipto the urban outside. Much larger urbandomes, Fuller-style, have also been proposedas ways to create climate-controlled urban airspaces within central Houston and in Dubai’shuge, 4.5 million square metre ‘mall of theworld’ project.

Atmo-terror: authored air, weaponisedweather

‘[State and non-state] terrorism, from anenvironmental perspective, voids thedistinction between violence against peopleand violence against things: it comprises aform of violence against the veryhuman-ambient “things” without whichpeople cannot remain people.’ (Sloterdijk2009, 25)

A final theme for a political ecology of urbanair surrounds the long and complex history ofthe deliberate manufacture or manipulationof bad or lethal air as a form of warfare orcoercion, or what Jacob Hamblin (2013)calls in his crucial book Arming MotherNature, ‘catastrophic environmentalism’.

As the smog-induced ‘nuclear winter’ inthe agricultural regions around Beijing inlate 2013 showed, a rapidly urbanisingworld experiencing tumultuous climate andsea-level changes is especially vulnerable tothe malign manipulation of climate for politi-cal ends, whether from states or non-states.

As already noted, Peter Sloterdijk has donemuch to excavate the political history of whathe calls ‘atmo-terror’: the deliberate manipu-lation of air, weather and climate as an ulti-mate means of destroying an enemy Other.Modelled on the gas attacks of the FirstWorld War with which we started thispaper, he shows how such ideas shaped thegas chambers of the Holocaust, techniquesof strategic fire and atomic bombing, theuse of hot and cold climates as means ofinflicting pain on detainees, and Cold Warexperiments in military weather modification

Figure 10 Oil and ice: the world’s largest freezer. Ski-Dubai’s 400-metre slopes are maintained at a constant228C even when summer temperatures beyond the wallssoar past 508C (Source: http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId¼10559969&searchId¼cd5bce6e1eebc4a6502d9334b77d79c7&npos¼22. Attri-bution licence: Jon Rawlinson)

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and biological and chemical warfare. (Thelatter, at least, has been widely practisedsince the Second World War.)

Such techniques, to Sloterdijk, involve theupscaling of ideas of air conditioning ofsmall, local ‘bubbles’ to larger urban, regionalor planetary scales. Indeed, Evans and Reid(2013, 126) remind us that ‘it is no coincidencethat we may trace the origin of climatic con-ditioning to warfare’. It is inevitable, then,that debates about weaponising weather—and the wider militarisation of nature—overlap with those concerned with usingsimilar geo-engineering techniques to addresscrises of climate change, intensifying extremeweather events and resource exhaustion.

Such a history, though, struggles to over-come the long-standing myth that meteorol-ogy and climate are entirely ‘natural’,drawing only on other-than-human forces.‘So long as meteorology presents itself as anatural science and nothing else’, Sloterdijk(2009) writes, ‘it can pass in silence over thequestion of the weather’s possible author’(86–87). Whilst the International Panel onClimate Change is coming fully to gripswith unintentional effects of urban-industri-alism on the earth’s atmosphere, it has so farfailed completely to address real or potentialacts of climatic warfare (see Hamblin 2013).

Such a shift is long overdue. ‘In the UnitedStates,’ one major US military study in 1996predicted, ‘weather-modification will likelybecome a part of national security policywith both domestic and international appli-cations’ (House et al. 1996). Intensifyingstorms, shaping cloud cover, denying rainand water, instigating severe heatwaves: theauthors predicted that a deeply hubristic mili-tary menu might be available by 2025whereby controllable airs might be deployedmechanically against ‘future adversaries’.Like a bad sci-fi film, they suggest that theUSA’s global meteorological stations andresearch centres simply be re-programmedto help control such events. This, however,is not science fiction: the US military widelyused cloud seeding in the Vietnam War totry and bog down the Viet Cong.

Unlike such ‘weather warfare’, JamaisCascio (2008) writes, ‘geoengineering wouldbe subtle and long term, more a strategicproject than a tactical weapon’. Future offen-sive geoengineering on a larger scale couldtake a wide variety of terrifying, and deeplyunpredictable, forms:

‘Over-productive algae blooms can actuallysterilize large stretches of ocean over time,effectively destroying fisheries and localecosystems. Sulfur dioxide carries health riskswhen it cycles out of the stratosphere. Oneproposal would pull cooler water from the deepoceans to the surface in an explicit attempt toshift the trajectories of hurricanes . . . ’

Full circle: urban atmo-terror

To finish our wide-ranging discussions, it isapposite to consider the ways in whichauthored and weaponised air has become acentral tactic of state security forces withininnumerable contemporary struggles overthe right to the city (Figure 11). Here acentury-long history of tear gas emergeswhich connects us back to the gas attacks ofthe Somme and elsewhere in the early 20thcentury.

Figure 11 Riot police using tear gas against protestorsnear Taksim Gezi Park demonstrating against the destructionof the park by a shopping mall development (Source: http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId¼22820617&searchId¼cedd6d67ec62c830c46e65c7ada4acd1&npos¼12. Attribution licence: Alan Hilditch).

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As Anna Feigenbaum (2014) has shown,the standard practice of tear-gassing protes-tors on city streets involved transmutingchemical weaponry from war to routine paci-fication (with often fatal consequences). Sowidespread are images of tear-gassed protes-tors in contemporary news reports, shewrites that, ‘desensitized to these images,people often forget that tear gas is a chemicalweapon, designed for physical and psycho-logical torture’.

As urban police forces become moremilitarised, so they deploy counter-insur-gency doctrine against domestic urbanpopulations in which pacification throughexploiting the defencelessness of breathingmutates into a major industry in its ownright (known, in the parlance, as ‘non-lethal’ or ‘less-lethal’ weaponry). Here,within the hybrid category of peace-war,we confront the most insistent momentswhere the right to air and the right to thecity are one and the same. ‘While tear gasremains banned from warfare under theChemical Weapons Convention,’ Feigen-baum emphasises:

‘its use in civilian policing grows. Tear gasremains as effective today at demoralizing anddispersing crowds as it was a century ago,turning the street from a place of protest intotoxic chaos. It clogs the air, the onecommunication channel that even the mostpowerless can use to voice their grievances. . . .As those who signed declarations [againstchemical weapons] at the Hague back in 1899knew, peace cannot be made through poison.’

With airspaces deliberately modified intotoxic and lethal devices as a standard atmo-terrorism means of undermining protestagainst the extremes of urban neo-liberalism,we confront a final example of where thepolitics of the urban becomes a politics ofair. Marijn Nieuwenhuis (2013), observingthe mass tear-gassing of 2013 protestsagainst the evictions of public parks fromIstanbul, argues that ‘the ongoing struggleover Gezi Park and other spaces aroundTurkey (and beyond) are no longer primarily

being fought on the ground. They are insteadincreasingly taking place in the air.’

As in the trenches of 1915, the gas maskbecomes a primary instrument of survival.‘Means of air conditioning (e.g. gasmasks) have instead turned into the primaryinstruments of resilience’, Nieuwenhuis con-tinues. ‘Any form of effective resistanceagainst atmo-terrorism should, therefore,start by securing the air from which lifesprings.’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the

author.

Note

1 Although it must be noted that more progress hasbeen made exposing the environmental injusticesand epidemiologies of air-pollution-related ill healthin cities—see Corburn, Osleeb, and Porter (2006),Morello-Frosch, Pastor, and Sadd (2001), andPearce, Kingham, and Zawar-Reza (2006).

2 These standards are as follows; for sulphur dioxide –20 micrograms per cubic metre of air on averageover 24-hours or 500 micrograms per cubic metre ofair on average over a 10-minute period; for nitrogendioxide – 40 micrograms per cubic metre of air onaverage over a year or 200 micrograms per cubicmetre of air on average over a 1-hour period; for 2.5micron diameter suspended particle matter – 10micrograms per cubic metre of air on average over ayear or 25 micrograms per cubic metre of air onaverage over a 24-hour period; and for 10 microndiameter suspended particle matter – 20 microgramsper cubic metre of air on average over a year or 55micrograms per cubic metre of air on average over a24-hour period. See World Health Organization(2005).

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