Sustaining comfort practices 33region and to understand some of the key factors by which some practices remain
stable and others disappear. Colonialism and empire gave particular socio-political
and architectural contexts through which the Planter’s Chair was popularized.
Indeed, in looking at its usage today, one context where it remains particularly
popular is in the lounges and verandas of the region’s colonial era hotels that hark
back to a “golden age” of European travel. Equally however, as a common feature
of veranda houses of the elite and wealthier middle classes of India and elsewhere,
they also speak to altogether different memories, as the following excerpt from
the online blog of an Indian interior designer illustrates:
This chair is exactly the kind of thing I picture when I hear my mom talk about
the “good old days” growing up in Bangalore. The key feature of the planter’s
chair is its swing-out arm extension meant for putting your feet up on...My mom
tells me we had two of these on the veranda of our family home on Museum
Road. I imagine my grandfather sinking into it and his thoughts on a balmy
afternoon, while his eleven kids tiptoed around him, planning the day’s itinerary
of scaling compound walls and climbing mango trees...The chair belonged to
Amrit’s grandfather. “I remember him sitting there, the man of the house, feet
up and smoking his hookah,” he says....As the Chennai sun streamed golden
through the window, I closed my eyes to visions of hookahs and mango trees
(Tiipoi Ltd 2014)Such examples point toward questions about which material and social
configurations enable such elements—in this case, a particular design of chair—
to remain in use. Perhaps the Planter’s Chair is an example of an element that has
marginal use in today’s high-density urban environments? In undertaking the task
of understanding forms of longevity and persistence, we can, however, identify
elements—such as hand fans, operable windows, slatted furniture, or the habit of
sitting on the floor—that remain far more common and widespread. The key here,
then, is understanding how particular material arrangements and social practices
came to stabilize in ways that constituted a larger regime of thermal comfort,
enabling the inhabitation of indoor spaces that are far less energy-intensive than
the air-conditioning paradigm prevalent today. And critically, accounting for why
certain practices fade or disappear while others remain popular allows us to begin
to anticipate the degree to which they might be maintained or revived as part of a
low-carbon comfort heritage, one that includes the forms of historic architecture
highlighted above. As Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012) note, it is analytically
productive to interrogate such questions through the lens of relations of bundles.
Accordingly they ask, “How do bundles and complexes of practice form, persist
and disappear? As elements link to form practices, so practices connect to form
regular patterns, some only loosely associated, others more tightly bound” (2012,
p. 17). One key question then in thinking about more sustainable forms of urban
development in Asia pertains to the role of AC in breaking the links between
existing bundled comfort practices and the degree to which old links might be
restored or existing elements can be brought into new, more resilient associations.