34 Tim Winter
Conclusion
To date, cultural geographers, planners, and sociologists working on Asia’s
cities have largely discussed sustainability in terms of exterior spaces.
Considerable work needs to be done to integrate their analyses with the ideas
and frameworks of architects and designers to construct a more critical analysis
of “interior geographies”. Along with escalators, elevators, and communications
infrastructures, climate control systems have formed part of the matrix of
technologies of construction across the region over the last half-century or so.
In exploring one of these—air conditioning—this chapter has argued that the
technology has proved pivotal in the expansion of high-rise architecture and rapid
urban development across much of Asia and, as such, constituted a powerful
element of urban modernity and economic development for many nation-states
in the region. However, and as noted earlier, as a largely invisible backdrop to
urban life, workplace, transport and leisure spaces, air conditioning very rarely
receives the critical attention it warrants. I would suggest its rapid uptake in many
of the region’s cities and countries has significant implications for developing
more sustainable, low-carbon futures. One key challenge here, then, is fostering a
wider debate around such issues and a critical awareness as to the environmental
implications of fast-changing comfort norms and expectations. A focus on comfort
practices and the ways in which buildings are occupied and used is thus seen as an
important step toward fostering wider awareness and debate.
To that end, this chapter has highlighted the need to develop a more critical
reading of indoor comfort and suggested there is considerable merit in shifting
attention toward the various ways comfort is achieved and practiced on a daily
basis. The speed and scale of development and urbanization in many parts of Asia
over recent decades has had a profound impact on everyday culture—both material
and non-material, including those cultural practices associated with the habitation
of indoor space. It has been suggested here that significant benefit arises from
pursuing the maintenance of those comfort practices that lie outside today regime
of electronic AC. Within this argument, the value of conserving and maintaining
non-air-con architecture has been acknowledged, but by foregrounding comfort
practices, it has been suggested that an architectural response is, in itself, not
enough to destabilize current trends toward AC usage. Rather, by placing the
built space within a wider analytical frame, it forms part of a more analytically
expansive way of understanding how low-carbon alternatives can be more
productively maintained and supported. As Tania Lewis in this volume argues
have argued, there is a need to move beyond technological or science-based
prescriptions of sustainability to more carefully consider how we might imagine
and practice green modernities and forms of urban development. To that end,
this chapter has highlighted the need to reframe indoor space as bundles and
configurations of comfort practice as the means to revive and retain low-carbon
alternatives to air conditioning.