Infrastructures of Care: Opening up “Home” as Commons in a Hot City

Abstract

What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for this response is high: our bodies have become sedentary, patterns of consumption individualized, and spaces of comfortable mobility and sociality in the city, termed in this paper as "infrastructures of care," have declined. Drawing on the findings of a transdisciplinary pilot study titled Cooling the Commons, this paper proposes that the production of the home as an enclosed and private space needs to be rethought as an infrastructure that potentially undermines more social, convivial, and environmentally sensitive responses to a warming world. The paper asks, what role might design now play in developing alternative infrastructures of care that start with the idea of "home" as a distributed proposition?

Comfort in chaos: A sensory account of climate change denial

“…Energy and climate literatures identify distinct forms of maladaptation related to practical, technical, and equitability issues around air conditioning. These include: air-conditioning electricity demand that overwhelms the energy grid in periods of extreme heat and leads to localised blackouts (Schlosberg et al., 2019); structural and political reliance on private air conditioning to make urban housing developments liveable (Haynes et al., 2021; Lopes et al., 2018; Lopes and Healy, 2021); the consumption of large amounts of energy that meets the needs of some, while exacerbating anthropogenic climate heat for others (Chappells and Shove, 2005; Salamanca et al., 2014; Tremeac et al., 2012; Viguié et al., 2020); and inequitable access amongst urban populations, with lower-income households legally or financially unable to install or run air-conditioning units (Hansen et al., 2011; Nicholls et al., 2017; Waitt and Harada, 2019).…”

Just Transitions: A Political Ecology Critique

“…In Australia, a transdisciplinary pilot project titled “Cooling the Commons” has sought to explore “more social, convivial, and environmentally sensitive responses to a warming world” (Mellick Lopes et al. 2018:41) by reframing the home as a distributed and communal entity. Foregrounding the concept of “coolth: the sensation of feeling cool in a heated atmosphere”, this work develops relational understandings of domestic spaces, while building on Indigenous knowledge (Mellick Lopes et al.…”

“…Foregrounding the concept of “coolth: the sensation of feeling cool in a heated atmosphere”, this work develops relational understandings of domestic spaces, while building on Indigenous knowledge (Mellick Lopes et al. 2018:43). It reveals intersecting infrastructures of care within the “cool commons” of the city, predicated upon a porous and socially relational perspective on urban lifeworlds.…”

The conditions of practical action: Neoliberalism and sustainability in the Australian road construction industry

“…These products deploy a discourse of sustainability yet remain ‘locked in’ to existing trajectories of their production, consumption and use (Dijk and Yarime, 2010), making them vulnerable to critique as an ‘instrumentalist mechanism in [a] rationalist project… of [ongoing] accumulation’ (Corson et al., 2013). As Mellick-Lopes (2009) argues, green consumerism ‘secures’ the ‘unimpeded continuance of the business-as-usual growth in materialist intensive “consumer” lifestyles’.…”