VIRTUAL: Yale Environmental History - 'Governing Thermal Environments: Energetic Mediations and the Politics of Urban Cooling in Asia'

In the lead up to the New Perspectives in Energy History conference on March 2nd, Yale Environmental History is pleased to host an online lecture by Chang Jiat Hwee (National University of Singapore): Governing Thermal Environments: Energetic Mediations and the Politics of Urban Cooling in Asia.

Abstract: Historians like Richard White, Ian Miller and Paul Warde see energy as a protean and useful concept that is good to think with because it facilitates comparative and connective analyses across time and space, scale and (conventional analytical) category. Foregrounding energy as an analytical concept has the further advantages of rendering visible the invisible “energy epistemologies” of our modernity and remediating what Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer called the “energy unconscious” of our modern culture.

However, the use of energy as a unit of equivalence to compare entities across time and space could also turn it into a totalizing and insidious framework based on the logic of productivism, as Cara New Daggett points out. Furthermore, as energy permeates everything through transfer and conversion, where do we draw our boundary of analysis and how do we understand the modality of connection? Scholars like Nelida Fuccaro and Pascal Ménoret warn us that if the connections between energy and society are under- mediated, there is the pitfall of these connections being reduced to determinist relations.

In this talk, I share how I grapple with the above issues in my on-going research on the socio-cultural histories and technopolitics of cooling infrastructures in Singapore and Doha, two cities heavily dependent on air-conditioning. The rapid rise in the use of the energy- profligate technology of air-conditioning in Singapore and Doha during the mid-twentieth century was inextricably linked to their statuses as a petropolis and the capital of a petrostate respectively. As a historian of the built environment and technology, my interests lie in understanding how air-conditioning, or the mechanical transfer and conversion of heat facilitated by the availability of cheap energy, was mediated by buildings and machines across different scales. I develop the concepts of thermal governance and urban thermal metabolism to understand these energetic mediations and connect them to the productivist and distributive logics of the developmental state of Singapore and the rentier state of Qatar respectively.

Bio: Jiat-Hwee Chang is Associate Professor of Architecture and Research Leader of the Science, Technology and Society Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of architecture, environment, and STS (Science, Technology and Society). He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), which was awarded an International Planning History Society Book Prize 2018 and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017, and the co- author of Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore (2022), which was awarded the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s Colvin Prize 2023. Jiat- Hwee is currently working on a book manuscript on the socio-cultural histories and techno- politics of air-conditioning and climate change in urban Asia. Jiat-Hwee’s research has been supported by institutions in North America, Britain, Germany, Australia, Cyprus, Qatar and Singapore.