Standing on the street in the middle of the summer in Madrid, feet swollen, skin dry and stiff, legs covered in dust from the pavement, hair on fire, brain and arms being burned by the sun, it often makes us wonder how much more heat can we take? And how much of that heat is an effect of weather and climate change, and how much is it the way in which space and society are organised and designed?

This special issue calls for an exercise in future thinking and preparing for life amidst climate change. However, climate change, with all its severe consequences, is already here. We already embody and experience climate change daily. In our project, we focus on heat and heatwaves as manifestations of climate change. Embodying Climate Change: Transdisciplinary Research on Urban Overheating   ^1  1   The project is funded from Norway and EEA grants 2014–2021 under the Basic Research Programme operated by the Polish National Science Centre in cooperation with the Research Council of Norway (grant No 2019/35/J/HS6/03992). More information: www.emclic.com.  ↩︎ takes a transdisciplinary approach to studying people’s embodied experiences of heat, as well as the practices and discourses of adaptation, in Warsaw and Madrid. Our focus is on cities, where most of humanity lives, both locally and globally contributing to and being affected by climate change  ^2  2   F. Chwałczyk, Around the Anthropocene in Eighty Names–Considering the Urbanocene Proposition, “Sustainability”, no. 12(11)/2020, p. 4458.  ↩︎. In this short article, we want to reflect on what anthropology can contribute to design amidst climate change in an urban context, and particularly to critically engage with the question: design for whom?

Heat and heatwaves as manifestations of climate change

Our individual bodies, communities and societies have adapted historically and culturally to particular weather conditions, such as extreme heat and heatwaves. Global changes in climate, and their extensive manifestations, are ultimately experienced locally  ^3  3   Anthropology and Climate Change. From Encounters to Actions, ed. S. Crate, M. Nuttall, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek 2009.  ↩︎. Existing adaptation measures in Madrid are different to those in Warsaw. However, the rising temperatures and resulting heat stress are one of the more visible and widely discussed manifestations of climate change that will only become more of a problem in the future.

People living in urban environments are more vulnerable to heat stress due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect  ^4  4   See e.g. R. D. Bornstein, Observations of the urban heat island effect in New York City, „Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology”, no. 7(4)/1968, p. 575–582.  ↩︎. Increased heat can be devastating not only to our physical but also mental health, and affects people’s wellbeing in varied ways, often exacerbating many diseases, and causing an increase in morbidity and mortality rates.  ^5  5   K. L. Ebi, T. Hasegawa, K. Hayes, A. Monaghan, S. Paz, P. Berry, Health risks of warming of 1.5°C, 2°C, and higher, above pre-industrial temperatures, “Environmental Research Letters”, no. 13(6)/2018.  ↩︎. Heat stress affects diverse populations disproportionately, with older adults (over 65 years old), infants, those with lower socio-economic status or pre-existing conditions, ethnic groups and women seeing higher risk rates than the average population  ^6  6   R. Basu, High ambient temperature and mortality: a review of epidemiologic studies from 2001 to 2008, “Environmental Health”, no. 8/2009, p. 40.  ↩︎. This happens due to a combination of physiological, biological and socio-economic structural factors. That means that some people, or groups of people, might be physiologically more prone to suffer from heat, but their situation might also be exacerbated by such factors as occupation, access to health advice, financial situation and support from friends and family. Peoples’ experiences of heat, and their ways of coping with it, are utterly personal and influenced by their relationship with the local environment and their own bodies, their health, their socio-economic situation, as well as by structural inequality. In our project, we  focus on older adults over the age of 65, who are often considered to be most affected by and most vulnerable to excessive heat.

Designing for and adapting to heat might be one of the most pressing issues we have to grapple with globally. But how can we design something that considers diverse experiences, expectations and needs, for instance different levels of thermal comfort? There is no such thing as a universal design, an adaptation that works for everyone. It is usually biased towards particular bodies and needs, to specific gender, age and ability. With this article, we want to suggest that there is incredible potential in learning about people’s existing adaptation measures, and thus rethinking how we approach the issues of vulnerability, climate change adaptation and design.

Connecting design, adaptation and vulnerability

We take an ecological and relational approach to design  ^7  7   See e.g. J. R. Maier, G. M. Fadel, Affordance based design: a relational theory for design, „Research in Engineering Design”, no. 20(1)/2009, p. 13–27.  ↩︎. In other words, we think of design in the broadest possible way, as inclusive of urban design – the city scale infrastructures – as well as the local adaptation strategies and resources used by people in their everyday lives. We consider three vital parts of the design that need to be taken into account: (1) the relationships and tensions between a designed object and the politics and intentions inscribed in it; (2) the various uses that people give to design objects, enacting, subverting or coproducing existing politics; and (3) the impact of design on the local environment in relation to existing ecological interactions, local context and history. From this perspective, design is not about things or spaces, but about affordances and possibilities of action. It is a relationship between a person trying to fulfil their needs and an object in an environment attending to those needs. It is a relationship that can potentially lead to a change in action or behaviour. Therefore, if our goal is to design for the future amidst climate change, we first need to think of the users’ material and intangible needs and practices. This approach overcomes one of the false oppositions we can fall into: object vs subject, environment vs person, as it steers towards a holistic approach to people and the environment.

Studies from the Hazard School have framed adaptation as “preventive adjustments” that “alter[s] the vulnerability of society to a hazardous event by curbing it or by designing human activities to prevent its injurious effects.”  ^8  8   I. Burton, R. W. Kates, G. F. White, The Environment as Hazard, Oxford University Press, New York 1978, p. 48.  ↩︎, What this definition fails to acknowledge is that social agents are actively challenging their own vulnerability, creating resistance mechanisms to their own social oppressions through social networks and relations, and developing situated solutions to sustain their life. These mechanisms emerge out of a long-term engagement with an environment and a clear understanding of how humans interact with nature within that environment  ^9  9   See e.g. S. E. Vaughn, Disappearing mangroves: The Epistemic Politics of Climate Adaptation in Guyana. “Cultural Anthropology”, no. 32/2017, p. 242–268.  ↩︎. These can be labelled as resilience or adaptation mechanisms. However, it is important to acknowledge that they do not emerge in response to a hazard, in the logic of design thinking, but as knowledge situated in a particular place  ^10  10   D. Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. “Feminist Studies”, no. 14(3)/1988, p. 575–599.  ↩︎. Such situated understandings of place evolve with the movements, shifting temporalities and changing rhythms of the city and the weather across time.

This is important, because the way we conceive of vulnerability affects the politics of adaptation  ^11  11   T. J. Bassett, C. Fogelman, Déjà vu or something new? The adaptation concept in the climate change literature, “Geoforum”, no. 48/2013, p. 42–53.  ↩︎. When we consider climate vulnerability in an essentialist way (“age makes people vulnerable”), we tend to objectify those features of vulnerability. This leads to “adjustment” adaptation – solutions that absorb the hazard without exposing the underlying social and physical causes of vulnerability, and measures the vulnerable communities are already taking to manage existing stressors. This strategy tries to return things to a kind of balance and is usually politically conservative. On the other hand, when we consider how social, economic and environmental relations shape structural vulnerabilities, we also acknowledge that vulnerable individuals can transform their social relations to construct and imbue local adaptation measures. Those measures can be “reformative” or “transformative”, disentangling and changing existing relations, while revealing that it is not age that makes people vulnerable, but loneliness, poverty, bad urban and architectural design, and certain other factors  ^12  12   E. Klinenberg, Heat wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2002.  ↩︎.

Discussions about climate change adaptation and vulnerability are part of broader issues of social and environmental justice and privilege. Design that considers climate change often seems to be available only for the privileged, for instance electric cars or ‘smart houses’. In the remaining part of this article, we would like to take a closer look at a common device designed to tackle heat – air conditioning units.

The case of air-conditioning

Air-conditioning units (“A/Cs”) are often perceived as being one of the most successful adaptive designs to heat. Indeed, they enable a person, or a group of people, to remain in a cooler environment and survive a heatwave. However, using A/Cs increases electricity consumption, usually not from renewable sources, and therefore contributes to climate change and to the urban heat island effect and ambient heat exposure  ^13  13   K. Lundgren, T. Kjellstrom, Challenges from Climate Change and Air Conditioning Use in Urban Areas, “Sustainability”, no. 5/2013, p. 3116–3128.  ↩︎. Therefore, what helps with a particular problem at an individual level, exacerbates the same problem on a community/city-wide and global scale  ^14  14   Lundgren-Kownacki, E. Dalholm Hornyanszky, T. A. Chu, J. Alkan Olsson, P. Becker, Challenges of using air conditioning in an increasingly hot climate, “International Journal of Biometeorology”, no. 62/2018, p. 401–412.  ↩︎. While A/Cs might be a useful adaptation to extreme heat for a privileged few, in fact they exacerbate the heat problem for vulnerable groups, and for everyone in the long term. Globally, the use of cooling infrastructure has tripled between 1990 and 2016, particularly in the Global North  ^15  15   International Energy Agency, The Future of Cooling. Opportunities for energy-efficient air conditioning, „OECD/IEA”, no. 92/2018.  ↩︎. Although air-conditioning units are becoming more and more popular, they are not widely available. In Spain in 2001 already 23.5% of households had cooling systems  ^16  16   A. Sanz Fernández, G. Gómez Muños, C. Sánchez-Guevara Sánchez, M. Núñez Peiró, Estudio tecnico sobre pobreza energetica en la ciudad de Madrid, Madrid 2016, p. 36, https://www.madrid.es/UnidadesDescentralizadas/Consumo/NuevaWeb/pobreza%20energética/Estudio%20Pobreza%20energética%204%20febrero%202017.pdf, accessed: 23 June 2022.  ↩︎, while in Poland in 2018 it was around 1%  ^17  17   Energy consumption in households in 2018, Statistics Poland, 2019, p. 129, https://stat.gov.pl/en/topics/environment-energy/energy/energy-consumption-in-households-in-2018,2,5.html, accessed: 23 June 2022. The comparison is not precise due to the differences in methodology and different time of data collection, but it gives some insight into the proportion difference.  ↩︎.

A/Cs are available only to privileged groups, not only because their purchase and installation is expensive, but because the cost of electricity consumed by a household rises significantly. A quick search on the internet shows that the purchase, installation and usage can cost up to EUR 775-1775 per unit in Spain; and between EUR 500-2500 in Poland. So, particularly in Poland, they are an expensive adaptive tool. And they remain a status symbol, a material object that symbolises modernity and development. Rental advisors suggest that placing A/Cs in flats for rent would increase the value of the property. A/Cs have become a default solution for maintaining thermal comfort in newly designed buildings, particularly those promoted as high end. They are installed in urban public and private offices to optimise the effectiveness of those working there.

Asking the question “design, but for whom?”, in the case of A/Cs installed in shared spaces, such as offices, libraries or public transportation, raises an interesting issue of defining thermal comfort: who defines the “neutral” or “preferred” temperature? As research shows, there are gendered differences in how people experience and define thermal comfort, with women tending to prefer higher temperatures than men  ^18  18   See e.g. S. Karjalainen, Thermal comfort and gender: a literature review, “Indoor Air: International Journal of Indoor Environment and Health”, no. 22(2)/ 2012, p. 96-109.  ↩︎. Similarly, with ageing, due to physiological changes in the body, the perception of temperature changes meaning that people above 60 years old tend to favour warmer environments compared to the choices of the younger generations  ^19  19   A. Kumar Mishra, M. Ramgopal, Field Studies on Human Thermal Comfort — An Overview, “Building and Environment”, no. 64/2013, p. 98.  ↩︎. Temperature differences, for instance between heat outside and cold inside, may be perceived as unpleasant or even dangerous to health. Older adults are often scared of catching a cold and are weary of drafts, trying to avoid them at all costs  ^20  20   B. Griefahn, C. Künemund, The effects of gender, age, and fatigue on susceptibility to draft discomfort, “Journal of Thermal Biology”, no. 26 (4–5)/2001, p. 395–400.  ↩︎. Despite these differences, temperatures in shared spaces, including public transportation, are usually adjusted to the preferences of young men.

A/Cs affect our bodies through the changes of the air temperature, but also through the noise they produce, which can be exacerbated at city level. This influences our health and wellbeing. Moreover, A/Cs can also influence our individual and societal capabilities of adapting to heat. There is evidence showing that our bodies can adapt to a certain extent to changing temperatures – the comfortable temperatures differ depending on the season  ^21  21   Mishra et al., op. cit., p. 98; R. Forgiarini Rupp, N. Giraldo Vásquez, R. Lamberts, A Review of Human Thermal Comfort in the Built Environment, “Energy and Buildings”, no. 105/2015, p. 178–205.  ↩︎. Overusing of A/Cs does not allow our bodies develop this capacity – in air-conditioned spaces, the range of perceived neutral temperatures is narrower than in naturally ventilated ones  ^22  22   Mishra et al., op. cit., p. 98.  ↩︎. Furthermore, installing A/Cs may interfere with the already existing, locally situated ways of dealing with heat. For example, in Spain, older adults often used to cool in their yards in the evenings. This is becoming impossible in the cities, since A/Cs warm the external spaces such as those yards.

Finally, A/Cs are a good example demonstrating how climate change adaptive design might not only reflect, but may even exacerbate social and environmental inequalities. As research demonstrates, people in more difficult socio-economic situations tend to live in warmer neighbourhoods, with less greenery, fewer refurbished buildings, closer to the centres of urban heat islands, and therefore are exposed to heat stress to a greater extent  ^23  23   S. L. Harlan, A. J. Brazel, L. Prashad, W. L. Stefanov, L. Larsen, Neighborhood Microclimates and Vulnerability to Heat Stress, “Social Science & Medicine”, no. 63 (11)/ 2006, p. 2847–63.  ↩︎. At the same time, they are less likely to be able to afford A/Cs, while wealthier, white collar workers are increasingly living in pleasant temperature bubbles, not forced to deal with the heat, and so more alienated from experiencing climate change.

A/Cs most often run on electricity produced from fossil fuels. A study conducted in 2010 in Madrid shows that A/C usage may be responsible for up to 33% of total peak energy consumption in the summer  ^24  24   M. Izquierdo, A. Moreno-Rodríguez, A. González-Gil, N. García-Hernando, Air Conditioning in the Region of Madrid, Spain: An Approach to Electricity Consumption, Economics and CO2 Emissions, „Energy”, nr 36 (3)/2011, s. 1630–1639.  ↩︎. According to the study, one household may produce a warming impact of up to 572 000t CO₂ per season. For comparison, according to the ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator, one flight of a full aircraft from Warsaw to Madrid would be responsible for the equivalent of 9.28t CO₂ emissions_.

Our current social and economic system, various designs and infrastructure, were all made possible by valuing and treating nature and its resources as “cheap”  ^25  25   R. Patel, J. W. Moore, A history of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet, University of California Press, Oakland 2017.  ↩︎. Through cheap fuels we have cheap electricity and (relatively) cheap A/C. So, in order to carefully design our adaptation to climate change, we might need to re-design the whole social and economic system. This relates to the materials used, as well as to the social and environmental implications of a particular design. One cannot ethically design smart cities, often heralded as urban part-solutions to challenges of living through climate change, without, for example, considering the problems surrounding the mining of coltan  ^26  26   J. W. Mantz, Improvisational economies: Coltan production in the eastern Congo, “Social Anthropology”, no. 16 (1)/2008, p. 34–50.  ↩︎.

Going back to the various perspectives of adaptation discussed above, we can strive for “adjustment” adaptation, maintaining economic growth and increased energy use as usual and with the same attitude towards resources and nature – this would mean “A/Cs for everyone”, or at least everyone that can afford it. A more “reformative” perspective would focus on limiting traditional growth, concentrating on green growth and renewable energy sources, which would mean that the A/Cs at least do not fuel climate change so much. A “transformative” approach would include changing energy systems and attitudes towards resources and nature, maximum A/C avoidance through architectural measures, deep interventions into city structure and functioning, as well as degrowth.

Such choices, on various scales – policy, city, industry and interior design – are design choices co-dependent on each other. In the end, an air-conditioning unit affords various possibilities of action while electricity is still quite cheap and unlimited, and when it becomes more expensive and intermittent amidst more excessive heatwaves.

Conclusion: Designing with situated experience and knowledge

We wrote the first version of this article at the beginning of our project. Since then, we have learnt that older adults use many inventive and creative ways to adapt to urban heat, which often build on intergenerational knowledge and experiences. People are often not even aware that they inadvertently designed adaptation tools.

The issues of social and environmental justice, and vulnerability need to be considered when designing for/within climate change. When we hear academic discussions on human “absorptive capacity’’, the human element of how much risk a person can cope with remains an abstract part of the debate. However, when trying to understand how a hazard – such as a heatwave – evolves and transforms socially, it is hard to separate it from the local conditions and situated adaptive solutions that pertain to it. Coping not only refers to the level of exposure to risk we can handle, but to the decisions we make and the creative solutions we find to maintain our wellbeing despite the hazard. Madrid has traditionally had extremely hot and dry summers, leading to long-term mechanisms passed down through generations to cope with heat, whether by staying inside and shutting the blinds during the hours of high heat and opening them in the evening, or by leaving the city to go to the beach, the mountains or rural villages. These strategies come before the hazard, not as a solution to it, but as a cultural anticipation to what we might be exposed to. In Warsaw, heat and heatwaves are more of a new phenomenon and it does not seem that we are individually or socially well adapted to it. In fact, the existing urban infrastructure design exacerbates the problem  ^27  27   Mencwel, Betonoza. Jak się niszczy polskie miasta, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Warszawa 2020.  ↩︎. So perhaps we can learn something from people in Madrid, or other places that have a longer history and culture of dealing with heat.

Climate change researchers place increasing emphasis on what is often called traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) about climate change  ^28  28   See e.g. F. Berkes, J. Colding, C. Folke, Rediscovery of traditional ecological knowledge as adaptive management, “Ecological Applications”, no. 10/2000, p. 1251–1262, doi.org/10.1890/1051-0761(2000)010[1251:ROTEKA]2.0.CO;2, access: 23 June 2022; E. A. Olson, Anthropology and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: A Summary of Quantitative Approaches to Traditional Knowledge, Market Participation, and Conservation, “Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment”, no. 35/2013, p. 140-151.  ↩︎. This usually relates to remote communities living in the Global South. However, people in many European communities, particularly older adults, can hold equally valuable insights on how to deal with changing weather patterns that are the results of an anthropogenic climate change. Our project builds on people’s direct experiences with a given hazard – heat, as well as their cultural adaptation strategies to inform existing and planned policy and design at any level – from individual objects, through streets and cities, to national policies. It also analyses the ways in which these policies and designs fail to include groups that might be the most vulnerable – older adults. With that, we want to strongly argue in favour of considering people’s situated knowledge and experience, their practices and life stories, when designing for/amidst climate change.

Article available under Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

References

J. Bassett, C. Fogelman, Déjà vu or something new? The adaptation concept in the climate change literature, “Geoforum”, no. 48/2013, p. 42–53.

Basu, High ambient temperature and mortality: a review of epidemiologic studies from 2001 to 2008, “Environmental Health”, no. 8/2009, p. 40.

Berkes, J. Colding, C. Folke, Rediscovery of traditional ecological knowledge as adaptive management, “Ecological Applications”, no. 10/2000, p. 1251–1262, doi.org/10.1890/1051-0761(2000)010[1251:ROTEKA]2.0.CO;2, access: 23 June 2022.

D. Bornstein, Observations of the urban heat island effect in New York City, „Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology”, no. 7(4)/1968, p. 575–582.

Burton, R. W. Kates, G. F. White, The Environment as Hazard, Oxford University Press, New York 1978.

Chwałczyk, Around the Anthropocene in Eighty Names–Considering the Urbanocene Proposition, “Sustainability”, no. 12(11)/2020, p. 4458.

Anthropology and Climate Change. From Encounters to Actions, ed. S. Crate, M. Nuttall, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek 2009.

L. Ebi, T. Hasegawa, K. Hayes, A. Monaghan, S. Paz, P. Berry, Health risks of warming of 1.5°C, 2°C, and higher, above pre-industrial temperatures, “Environmental Research Letters”, no. 13(6)/2018.

Forgiarini Rupp, N. Giraldo Vásquez, R. Lamberts, A Review of Human Thermal Comfort in the Built Environment, “Energy and Buildings”, no. 105/2015, p. 178–205.

Griefahn, C. Künemund, The effects of gender, age, and fatigue on susceptibility to draft discomfort, “Journal of Thermal Biology”, no. 26 (4–5)/2001, p. 395–400.

Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. “Feminist Studies”, no. 14(3)/1988, p. 575–599.

L. Harlan, A. J. Brazel, L. Prashad, W. L. Stefanov, L. Larsen, Neighborhood Microclimates and Vulnerability to Heat Stress, “Social Science & Medicine”, no. 63 (11)/ 2006, p. 2847–63.

Izquierdo, A. Moreno-Rodríguez, A. González-Gil, N. García-Hernando, Air Conditioning in the Region of Madrid, Spain: An Approach to Electricity Consumption, Economics and CO2 Emissions, “Energy”, no. 36 (3)/2011, p. 1630–1639.

International Energy Agency, The Future of Cooling. Opportunities for energy-efficient air conditioning, „OECD/IEA”, no. 92/2018.

Karjalainen, Thermal comfort and gender: a literature review, “Indoor Air: International Journal of Indoor Environment and Health”, no. 22(2)/ 2012, p. 96-109.

Klinenberg, Heat wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2002.

Kumar Mishra, M. Ramgopal, Field Studies on Human Thermal Comfort — An Overview, “Building and Environment”, no. 64/2013, p. 98.

Lundgren, T. Kjellstrom, Challenges from Climate Change and Air Conditioning Use in Urban Areas, “Sustainability”, no. 5/2013, p. 3116–3128.

Lundgren-Kownacki, E. Dalholm Hornyanszky, T. A. Chu, J. Alkan Olsson, P. Becker, Challenges of using air conditioning in an increasingly hot climate, “International Journal of Biometeorology”, no 62/2018, p. 401–412.

R. Maier, G. M. Fadel, Affordance based design: a relational theory for design, „Research in Engineering Design”, no. 20(1)/2009, p. 13–27.

W. Mantz, Improvisational economies: Coltan production in the eastern Congo, “Social Anthropology”, no. 16 (1)/2008, p. 34–50.

Mencwel, Betonoza. Jak się niszczy polskie miasta, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Warszawa 2020

A. Olson, Anthropology and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: A Summary of Quantitative Approaches to Traditional Knowledge, Market Participation, and Conservation, “Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment”, no. 35/2013, p. 140-151.

Patel, J. W. Moore, A history of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet, University of California Press, Oakland 2017.

Sanz Fernández, G. Gómez Muños, C. Sánchez-Guevara Sánchez, M. Núñez Peiró, Estudio tecnico sobre pobreza energetica en la ciudad de Madrid, Madrid 2016, p. 36, https://www.madrid.es/UnidadesDescentralizadas/Consumo/NuevaWeb/pobreza%20energética/Estudio%20Pobreza%20energética%204%20febrero%202017.pdf, accessed: 23 June 2022.

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E. Vaughn, Disappearing mangroves: The Epistemic Politics of Climate Adaptation in Guyana. “Cultural Anthropology”, no. 32/2017, p. 242–268.