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Paper short abstract

This paper examines moss-based air filters that cool and purify the air. It analyzes how humans try to prove the air filters’ effects by quantification, and it reflects on air’s unruly spatiality, mobility, and temporality that eludes human fixation and measurement.

Paper long abstract

This paper traces troubled airs (Calvillo 2023) as they circulate through polluted urban spaces, ventilated moss surfaces, and engineered wind channels, asking how air—understood as a relational entity and social medium (Adey 2014; Horn 2018)—behaves in standardized laboratories, modelled outdoor settings, and in interaction with trees and other plants. Drawing on empirical and ethnographic research on air technologies, the paper examines human efforts to modify urban atmospheres by circulating air through ambient filters that cool and purify the air with moss. These techno-natural assemblages promise to render increasingly hot and polluted urban air healthier and more comfortable. The paper further shows how companies seek to demonstrate the efficiency of these arrangements by translating the activity and effects of air flowing through the moss-based air filters into quantifiable metrics, including temperature reduction and particulate matter removal. These effects are rendered comparable to the estimated benefits of trees, to human breathing volumes, or are expressed in degrees Celsius and micrograms. Beyond only partially measurable micro-scale reductions, the paper analyzes the broader political and social effects of these filters and their translated, quantified effects, including their role in experimental urban governance, the production of political legitimacy, and processes of public acceptance. Conceptually, the paper reflects on the spatiality, mobility, and temporality of air, highlighting its unruly nature, which eludes the logics of human quantification and visualization.