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

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.

Respondent: Kim Förster

A Research Seminar Series co-organised with Rixt Woudstra (Assistant Professor in Architectural History, University of Amsterdam).