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This workshop is organised by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore; with support from Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 (MOE2018-T2-2-120) – Heat in Urban Asia: Past, Present, and Future.

This workshop examines the relationship between cooling technologies, the environment, and societies in Asia through interdisciplinary perspectives. Cooling technologies include, but are not limited to, those that create airflow, evaporation, endothermic reactions, and refrigeration cycles. They also include broader technological infrastructures, such as airconditioned built environments, produce cold chains, and the electricity and water networks that support them. Residents of Asia have long relied upon such technologies to regulate thermal sensations and to preserve and distribute produce. At the same time these cooling technologies have modified Asian environments across different scales, in both direct and indirect ways. In contemporary Asia, cooling technologies have become a major source of energy consumption and, so, are contributing to both local and global patterns of climate change.

This workshop explores cooling technologies from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Rather than focusing solely upon technological innovation, we intend to also examine these technologies in use, and explore them throughout their life cycles, considering multiple dimensions including the socio-cultural adaptation of technologies, maintenance and repair, energy consumption, and pollution and waste. We recognize that our technological infrastructures are shaped by social, political, and cultural choices, and shape these choices in turn. The cooling technologies we choose are influenced by social norms of comfort, health and convenience, but many other factors besides. Cooling technologies are co-constituted with cooling practices and thermal material cultures, as Elizabeth Shove and others point out.  

We are indeed interested in an array of cooling technologies for both dry and humid climates. Many of the discussions of cooling technologies tend to be divided into passive and active modes, structural solutions and power-operated solutions, or pre- and post-air-conditioning. We would like to think beyond such binaries to engage with a mix or combination of modes and solutions through not just designed mixed-mode buildings, but also heterogeneous assemblies of technologies and spaces produced through everyday uses; what David Edgerton calls “creole technologies”. In addition, none of the categories is monolithic. Passive mode, for instance, do not just involve hardscapes such as buildings, but also softscapes like landscaping and vegetation. Furthermore, power-operated solutions include technologies of different energy intensities, from low-energy fanning and evaporative technologies to high-energy conventional air-conditioning.

We aim to address “environment” at different scales—e.g. built, urban, and planetary—and if possible, trace their connections. The cooling of one environment might lead to the warming of another, for example: i.e. air conditioning the interior environment of a building might mean putting waste heat to the exterior and exacerbating the urban heat island effect. Furthermore, as air-conditioning is an energy-intensive technology, its use contributes to an increase in carbon emission, as most of the world’s electricity is still generated from fossil fuels that worsen global warming. Hence, one of the key questions of cooling the environment in a time of the climate crisis is: how do we cool ourselves without further warming the planet? To answer this question, we seek to examine cooling technologies and the environments created in relation to what Nicole Starosielski calls “thermal cultures” in which certain thermoceptive regimes are cultivated to further specific social and political ends through biological and environmental manipulations. Such situated understandings of the techno-enviro-politics of cooling are essential to any thinking about the future of cooling in a low carbon world.   

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Assoc Prof Gregory CLANCEY
Asia Research Institute, and Department of History, National University of Singapore

Assoc Prof Jiat-Hwee CHANG
Asia Research Institute, and Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore

Assoc Prof Christopher COURTNEY
Department of History, Durham University

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