SAH Conference, Chicago, 2027: The call for papers has been announced – and there are some fascinating and timely panels planned. This one caught our eye….
Session Chairs: Zhijian Sun and Qingyun Lin
Session Title: Cooling the Tropical Built Environment: Discomfort, Decolonization, and
Decarbonization
Session Description:
Tropical climate and building problems related to heat and humidity have long troubled
professionals both within and beyond the tropics, who resorted to various climatic
techniques around (late-)colonial networks to tame the tropics. During the Cold War, the
tropical world became a contested arena in the name of development aid. Despite relying
on a globally circulated climatic knowledge, thermal comfort norms and cooling
technologies, these state and non-state actors from socialist, capitalist and non-aligned
countries who engaged in postcolonial development, often produced discourses of
“tropicality” that deviated from Euro-American templates.
The stakeholders in the Global South were never merely passive recipients of
technological expertise, however. Rather they were often active mediators of multi-
directional global exchanges of “architectural resources”, in Łukasz Stanek’s (2020) term.
We invite papers interrogating global, transnational and local dynamics through
marginalized cases in the long-twentieth centuries across any (sub-)tropical areas,
including Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East
and elsewhere. We particularly welcome the nuanced perspective of “seeing from the
South,” especially how Southern institutions and individuals negotiated external
interventions around “collaborative” frameworks filled with heterogeneity, competition and
contingency. By examining processes, consequences and legacy of local reimagination
and reinterpretation of climate, built spaces, thermal (dis)comfort, labor and body, this
panel speaks to what Daniel Barber (2019) calls “decarbonization as decolonization.”
Drawing on Nicole Starosielski’s (2021) critical temperature studies, we view tropical built
environment’s (uneven) management of heat and cold as means of “enacting racialized,
classed and gendered forms of power.” We encourage proposals that engage the
interdependence between architecture’s climatic techniques, human body, non-human
actors, and exercise of socio-political power, focusing on the underappreciated roles of
marginalized people, suppressed knowledge, neglected practices, or ignored things.
Conference details https://sah.org/conferences/chicago-2027/call-for-papers-2027-annual-international-conference/ and full list of panel themes:
Transnational Architecture Group 