Air Conditions

Clean air is a rare occurrence. It is rather a nostalgic memory in the context of the contemporary city – defined by the sprawling megacities that in many cases carry over a legacy of industrialism and infrastructures based on the archaic energy sources of the planetary underground. Materialities of breathing and sustaining life in the specific chemical zones we call cities is one particular approach one can take to urban planning and architecture; what sort of zones for breathing are designed, intentionally or unintentionally? The atmosphere is one particular way of thinking about the built environment by way of the air-conditioning modernity where air is not merely the romantic deep breath in, but a chemically measured reality increasingly also measured as data – and managed as data.

We encounter political dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion, exposure and security already on the level of particles such as dust. Dust and air pollution are silent aggressors that demonstrate the political urgency of the atmospheric condition: the age of modern design can also be understood as one of bubbles and spheres, as Peter Sloterdijk argues, referring to the constitution of subjectivity as an air-conditioning operation. Modernity opens up as air conditioning and as airborne terror: of denying the possibility of breathing the air of streets and public spaces. Terror begins in the air. This claim connects political contexts of cleaning and dusting to issues of chemical warfare. Such warfare is not merely an issue of the usual armed conflicts, but an increasingly naturalised part of security regimes that govern the urban sphere: an air of gas and clouds, of molecular combinations designed to turn the social breathing space into a space of suffocation. This has become evident during the past years of security politics of excessive tear gas use as a quasi-military form of urban sanitisation against social movements. Examples are plentiful, including for example the infamous case of Turkey during and after the Gezi demonstrations in 2013, the events in Ferguson in 2014, and more recently, the use of tear gas against environmental protestors during #COP21 in Paris. The list could go on and include a longer history of the normalisation of such techniques of denial of air.