Between 2010, when Qatar won the World Cup bid, and 2021, the year before the tournament was held there, over 6,500 deaths of South Asian migrant workers were reported, most of which were classified as ‘natural causes’ rather than work-related injuries (The Guardian, 2021). Despite Qatar's celebration of the ‘sustainable cooling technology,’ few migrant construction workers enjoyed the air-conditioned comfort in new stadiums (Inside FIFA, 2022). Worse still, air-conditioning, as what Cherian George (2020) calls the ‘selfish technology,’ transfers heat from inside to external environments, resulting in harsher working conditions. The Qatar example reflects current predicaments against the backdrop of global warming, for as Rohinton Emmanuel points out, the overemphasis on cooling individual buildings and enduring reliance on the energy-intensive mechanical cooling neglects wider urban contexts. By politicizing and historicizing tropical climate and urban heat mitigation, Emmanuel offers us a revealing historical re-review of aspects of ‘tropicality’ (Arnold, 1996), as well as an inspiring proposal of a climate-responsive ‘tropical urbanism.’ My commentary focuses on two crucial aspects highlighted by Emmanuel, the ‘reconstruction of sociocultural perceptions of tropical heat’ and the ‘commons-centred’ approach to tropical urbanism. Emmanuel's reconsideration of the Western view of tropical climate as an inherently negative Other to temperate zones (in terms of discomfort, biological risks and backwardness) invites further discussion on its internal heterogeneity. It is noteworthy that the Western denigration of the tropics ‘medically, morally and mentally’ was not fixed, but always historically situated and socioculturally constructed around colonial networks (Livingstone, 2024). This is a ‘hot topic’: in the last decade, increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to wider critical understanding of discourses of ‘tropicality’ (from Euro-American templates) in relation to shifting geo-political contexts (Levin, 2022; Stanek, 2020). There has been much critique of the sociocultural consequences of the air-conditioned spaces (from industrial complexes to urban households) and their underlying narrow thermal comfort zone (Heschong, 1979). As a climatic standard universalized by American engineers to sell comfort everywhere, this reductive comfort understanding was criticized as reducing the human body to a skin-sealed heat-regulating machine without acknowledging sociocultural variations (Murphy, 2006). To move beyond this, the physiological view based on field surveys paid particular attention to people's variant capacities of thermal adaptation to surroundings considering varying socio-cultural norms (Shove, 2003). For instance, tropical architecture educator Otto Koenigsberger found that some tropical long-term inhabitants still felt comfortable at higher temperature ranges than the standard American comfort zone (Chang, 2016). As I have discussed elsewhere in the SJTG, inhabitants in Maoist-era Wuhan were believed to have a wider range of thermal adaptation than those in Guangzhou (Sun, 2023). Therefore, instead of the airtight building machine, a thermally diverse and dynamic environment based on natural ventilation was increasingly advocated. However, I do not mean to emphasize the dichotomy between mechanical cooling and passive cooling. The air-conditioned comfort norm was not necessarily peculiar to American ‘thermal capitalism’ (Murphy, 2006) or ‘thermal colonialism’ established by white settlers (Hobart, 2022). Rather, it also played a vital role in the ‘thermal socialism’ of socialist China and postcolonial South-South collaboration (Sun, 2025). Instead of simply denouncing the universal technology, Chang Jiat Hwee and Tim Winter (2015) argue that air-conditioning became an integral part of ‘thermal modernity’ in post-independence Singapore's nation-building endeavours. Even within the British (late-)colonial network, perspectives towards tropical climate and thermal comfort were rather divergent. As Chang (2016) reveals, British colonial liaison officer George Atkinson's ‘reductive understanding of comfort’ was inspired by the American air-conditioning industry's laboratory-based research, while Otto Koenigsberger, the pioneer of ‘climatic design’ pedagogy, was influenced by the nineteenth-century climatic determinist ideas and the twentieth-century European industrial physiologists’ fieldwork findings. In contrast to Atkinson's mechanistic understanding of comfort as a naturalizing attribute measured by ‘heat input and output,’ Koenigsberger, who took into account local inhabitants’ sociocultural adaptation, highlighted the cooling power of airflow with ‘natural means,’ rather than air-conditioning. Thus, the laboratory-based and fieldwork-based findings, reductive and physiological views of comfort and mechanical cooling and natural ventilation co-existed across the Empire. To reach a truly vernacular or individualized heat management, it is crucial to review the historical transformation and internal heterogeneity of thermal comfort understanding. Emmanuel invites us to revisit the notion of ‘urban commons’ (informed by both social processes and institutional design), at the intersections of urban political ecology and critical temperature studies. By examining multiple power-relations, scholars in political ecology have increasingly recognized that a series of urban and environmental processes have benefited some social groups at the expense of others (Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003). When it comes to urban heat mitigation, according to Nicole Starosielski (2021), temperature is neither neutral nor objective, because the uneven distribution of heat or cold is the means of ‘enacting racialized, classed and gendered forms of power.’ In the name of thermal objectivity, thermal media (ranging from tropical urban planning, individual buildings to wearable devices) will alleviate urban heat effects for some while intensifying its harm for certain vulnerable groups. By scrutinizing the specificities of various tropical urban climates across Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, Emmanuel reveals that the commons-based approaches to urban heat mitigation is an inherently trans-scalar agenda. However, it is more difficult to establish neighbourhood bonds, institutional structures and governance in cases of informal urbanization found in some tropical cities (Agyabeng et al., 2022). Emmanuel considers that management of thermal environments in informal settlements is an urgent problem, which cannot be easily solved through the critiques of air-conditioning as the culprit or the advocacy of returning to conventional passive cooling. If we do not figure out how to properly distribute cooling for certain vulnerable groups, thermal privilege and violence will be increasingly normalized as new inequality. This relates also to shading. As Bloch (2025) details for Los Angeles, ‘canopy inequality’ continues to follow lines of wealth: people living in detached villas enjoy lush greenery and shaded open spaces, while disadvantaged neighbourhoods that cannot afford tree planting suffer from higher temperatures on unshaded streets. Although Singapore is well-known for bringing greenery into the built environment for sustainable cooling (Newman, 2014), migrant workers living in dormitories in the unshaded industrial zones are still exposed to extreme heat (Ferng, 2021). Furthermore, thermal exchanges should be reckoned with across multiple scales and dimensions, as shown in Emmanuel's lament for the lost links between inside and outside: waste heat from air-conditioned buildings is continuously heating up the external environment, rendering conventional cooling methods no longer sufficient to bring thermal comfort. When people become accustomed to the narrow comfort zone, outdoor common spaces are replaced by interiorized, centralized and air-conditioned ones (Chang & Winter, 2015). Learning from history and everyday practices is in line with what Emmanuel advocates as exploring new ways to ‘live with heat,’ or ‘decarbonization as decolonization,’ in Daniel Barber's (2019) term. According to Barber, relying on current climatic norms (is never enough for us to ‘renegotiate thermal comfort.’ Since the struggle for comfort means struggling for justice, we must explore the new edge of comfort and ‘design for discomfort’ according to reframed values and desires in the context of urban warming. Open access publishing facilitated by Queensland University of Technology, as part of the Wiley - Queensland University of Technology agreement via the Council of Australasian University Librarians.
Zhijian Sun (Thu,) studied this question.