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Paper short abstract:

Chris Pearson, Prinicipal Investigator of the Wellcome-funded project 'Melting Metropolis: Everyday Histories of Health and Heat in London, New York, and Paris since 1945' will introduce its aims, approach, and methodologies, before discussing changing representations of heatwaves in postwar London.

Paper long abstract:

Chris Pearson, Prinicipal Investigator of the Wellcome-funded project 'Melting Metropolis: Everyday Histories of Health and Heat in London, New York, and Paris since 1945' will introduce the project's aims, approach, case study sites, and methodologies, including its strong emphasis on community and public engagement. He will stress the importance of exploring the unequal sensory experiences of heat in cities whose infrastructure is not designed for high temperatures.

He will then present the findings of preliminary research and community engagement conducted in Somers Town, incluring the co-production of a mural, led by project Research Artist Bryony Benge-Abbott. This will lead into a discussion of postwar images of heatwaves in postwar London, drawn from newspapers and social media. He will argue that the heatwave of July 2022, when temperatures reached over 40C for the first time, marked something of a turning point as images of heatwaves as "fun" were supplemented by the portrayal of heatwaves as a disaster. Nonetheless, the initial findings from London suggest that individuals' emotional and sensory experiences of heatwaves remain to the be adequately represented.

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Paper short abstract:

This project examines how summer heat burdens shaped New Yorkers’ lives at the turn of the twentieth century. New York City absorbed and stored solar radiation—the climatological effect of the urban heat island—by the mid-1800s. Climatological vulnerabilities compounded other forms of precarity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how summer heat burdens shaped working-class New Yorkers’ lives at the turn of the twentieth century. The city’s working class and poor had limited access to climate-control technologies before the 1940s and thus lived attuned, and exposed, to summer heat and humidity. Making visible climate-based inequalities, this paper documents how the densely-built city of brick and concrete absorbed and stored solar radiation—the climatological effect known today as the urban heat island—by the mid-1800s. It illustrates how environmental vulnerabilities build upon other forms of precarity of urban life. Bodies experience and process heat similarly regardless of how the census identifies race, but not all built environments process heat the same way. The “moneyed class” of New York, both whites and, by the 1920s, Harlem’s growing class of Black elites, purchased comfort via additional ice, escaping to newly air-conditioned theaters in the 1920s, or leaving the city. This paper focuses on people unable to escape overcrowded tenement living. As the city’s worst (and cheapest) housing, tenements were the traditional starting point for new arrivals. By 1900, over 82,000 tenements housed 2.3 million New Yorkers. The tenement combined with summer weather to create a collective experience of heat. I argue that the roots of the city’s climate equity gaps and traditions of residents and reformers who sought to mitigate summertime environmental challenges originated in the nineteenth century.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Parisians responded to episodes of extreme heat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces contemporaries’ experiences in newspapers to consider the effects that hot weather had on their bodies and the coping strategies that they put in place.

Paper long abstract:

Across France, thermometers have risen to record-high levels: summer 2023 has been announced as the fourth hottest summer since 1900. In Paris, the effects of the hot weather have prompted the creation of initiatives to help urbanites: swimming pools and parks have longer opening hours, and a map of “cool islands” – indicating the locations of water fountains, green spaces, fresh indoor spaces – has been published by the council. How did Parisians live through summer hot weather in the past? This paper explores the ways in which urban dwellers in Paris experienced heat and focuses on specific episodes of extreme hot weather in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1898, 1900, 1911). Parisians were hot and their experiences were recorded and circulated across a range of media. Drawing on newspaper articles and photographs, this paper examines the bodily sensations that heat provoked (e.g. perspiration, dehydration, fatigue) and the strategies that were devised to deal with those undesirable effects within the city. Looking at human interactions with the urban environment through the lens of heat sheds light on, and reasserts the importance of, the sensory dimensions of contemporaries’ experiences of cities and has potential to inform future responses to heatwaves in urban settings, both individual and institutional.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the evolving attitudes toward air conditioning as the technology spread into private spaces.

Paper long abstract:

In 1959, the U.S. Weather Bureau created a new measure for the residents of large cities, “the discomfort index.” The title was soon changed to the cumbersome “temperature-humidity index,” and, later, the simpler “heat index.” The original title is revealing, appealing to the individual sensation and expectation of “comfort,” framing urban heat as a miserable condition to be measured. The timing of this new measure is also interesting, coming when many public, urban buildings had become air conditioned, but before most individual homes or spaces were.

As urban air conditioning spread in the 1950s and 1960s, the technological shift raised important cultural questions. Was the assumption of individualized – as opposed to public – climate control inevitable? Did the increased access to artificially cooled spaces change how people perceived heat and urban living?

Along with a focus on attitudes toward air conditioning in this cultural moment, this paper will frame the discussion in the broader, familiar paradoxes of how many revolutionary technologies, improving the experience of daily living, had unforeseen consequences. In particular, this paper will address the relationship between individualized cooling and worsening urban heat.

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Paper short abstract:

What is a heat "wave"? Does our historical understanding of heat waves, and how to deal with them, leave us poorly prepared for urban climate impacts?

Paper long abstract:

Over the past few years I have worked with a number of community organizations in Cincinnati that are attempting to mitigate or address climate impacts in "front line" and/or historically marginalized urban neighborhoods. Many of these discussions are based on helping communities develop plans to deal with increased urban heating. These conversations however, and most importantly the policy interventions proposed, frame climate change as mostly causing more urban heat "waves": Discreet moments in time when temperatures become significantly higher, increasing the likelihood of health issues. This means that proposals focus on expanding existing heat event interventions - like cooling centers or distributing free fans - rather than rethinking how significant summer temperature increases will impact Cincinnatians long term, and how to adjust all aspects of city and public health planning to address these issues.

Obviously this is more of a contemporary policy and political issue, but I think history can inform this discussion. How have we constructed the idea of the "heat wave" in the past, and what are the social and political factors that led to the development of certain interventions for lower-income communities? Overall what can this tell us about how climatic changes - in the past, present and future - can upend and rewrite our perceptions of time? I would be excited to participate in this workshop because I think the historical experience of urban heat is vital tool for helping us understand – and plan for – our warming world.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the evolution of an environmental oral history project that is working with individuals, community groups and schools to investigate everyday experiences of extreme heat in London in the second half of the twentieth century.

Paper long abstract:

Seasonal hot weather, rising global temperatures and the urban heat island effect all present challenges for city dwellers and their surroundings. However, while Londoners have long struggled with the inequitable impacts of high temperatures, we know very little about how they have experienced and thought about extreme heat from an everyday perspective, nor how they have sought to cope with its consequences. To address this, the environmental oral history work strand of the Melting Metropolis project interrogates historical attempts to secure physical and emotional health in Somers Town, London.

This paper reflects on the opportunities and challenges involved in undertaking such a project and outlines progress to date. Drawing on Williams and Riley (2020), it considers how environmental oral history methods and testimony can be constructive in interrogating the practices, meanings and power relations inherent in normative discourses of urban heat, that are usually premised on notions of individual resilience. Through reflections on the organisation and experience of interviews, workshops and an intergenerational oral history project, the paper further explores the prospects of this approach.

Oral history has been underutilised in the field of environmental history and this paper provisionally points to its value in creating more inclusive narratives around the impacts of extreme urban heat. The complex, varied experiences of high temperatures and health highlight the extent to which individuals and communities are affected differently and unequally, which in turn demands more nuanced responses if we are to create equitable and just climate change mitigation.

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Paper short abstract:

Join Bryony Benge-Abbott, Research Artist in the Melting Metropolis project, to learn about her work "Drawing Heat," a exploration of the built environment climate change, and cities. Bryony will share a practice that centres bodily experiences of climate through simple, experimental mark-making.

Paper long abstract:

Community Engagement is woven throughout the Melting Metropolis project, which interrogates everyday experiences of urban heat as a feature of environment. Long-term collaboration with those who are directly affected by urban heat will shape and inform Melting Metropolis' research through oral histories, co-created creative projects, and public engagement. As the project's Research Artist, Bryony Benge-Abbott is focusing specifically on the sensory experience of urban communities affected by rising temperatures. Her work integrates both lived experiences and academic research to develop new participatory public artworks, which can engage the wider public in conversations about the diverse and unequal effects of urban heat islands.

Following a presentation by Dr Chris Pearson and Dr Kara Schlichting, Benge-Abbott will share Drawing Heat, one of the creative practices she has developed for Melting Metropolis's community engagement programme. Drawing Heat centres the body as a medium through which to explore new perspectives of the landscape, and our relationship to it.