Introduction
Anthropogenic climate change has great immediacy in Australia. The past decade has seen drought with severe aridity, unprecedented wildfire, and unending rain and flooding.1 Last year brought another fiery summer in Western Australia and the Northern Territories.2 Throughout all of this, particularly in areas like Western Sydney, heat remains a persistent threat. Even when the temperature is not high enough to pose a threat to human health (above 36 degrees Celsius in low humidity, and above 33 degrees Celsius in high humidity),3 it is still a drag: subjecting us to discomfort, fraying nerves, and weathering us down in the process.4
It comes as no surprise then, that climate control is seen as an appealing response.
Rather than find ways to control the climate, we must form different relationships with it. For the past ten years, we have been working in Western Sydney, shaping alternative narratives about living well with the weather.
Commons are living relations between communities; built and natural places that are a pretext for continuing to live well in a changing climate. In contrast to the atomization of society that occurs when air conditioning in enclosed private or privatized spaces is all we have, commons at their core are about the sustenance of social life and practices capable of responding to the vagaries of the weather.
Cool commons are the living relations and social infrastructures that afford the sharing of coolth: the condition of feeling cool and being cool. Coolth, a late-nineteenth-century term opposed to warmth, creates a relation between a state of mind, bodily experience, practice, and place.5 Phillippe Rahm describes a time when all architecture was thermal architecture and “a house was designed to be a ‘river of air.’”6 Ventilation corridors, breezeways, porches, and verandas allowed for the movement of air and people between the inside and out.7 As the term coolth fell out of public usage, it became a technical term associated with the commoditized manufacture of cool air via air conditioning. While we understand the necessity of air conditioning, it follows the logic of enclosure: a cool inside made possible by shifting the heat outside. We seek to defend coolth as an expression of local, relational, and ontological sensitivity that is the antithesis of “set and forget” climate control.
Coolth requires constant negotiation, particularly in places where commons are being eroded via neglect, removal, or replacement. As a relational condition, coolth is not visible, but becomes painfully so via its lack.
Living with Urban Heat: Becoming Climate-ready in Social Housing gathered stories from residents about what it is like to live with the heat.8 We’ve heard stories of housing stock too old or neglected to shelter people, and the removal of social infrastructures that brought relief and sociability in the past (like public water fountains and seating, shaded pedestrian linkages), and their replacement with what Ronald Horvath once called “machine space.”9 These are more than stories of the “less fortunate”; they are testimony to a process of autonomic urban development. From the same people, we also heard stories that tap into the social sensibility of coolth, pointing to plural ways of weathering well that include what we eat and wear, where and when we participate in social life, and what being at “home” in the world looks like.
Gareth lives in a seventy-year-old weatherboard house in a town outside Sydney whose inhabitants regularly experience extreme heat and where flood waters have recently lapped his neighbor’s doorstep. Gareth’s uninsulated house faces due west with a veranda “you couldn’t swing a cat on.” In a place like this, the capacity to escape the house during hot days is crucial, and while Gareth has physical mobility issues, he has wheels and the skills to keep his and his kids’ cars in good repair. Gareth draws on his deep knowledge and connection to Country (the Indigenous Australian understanding of place and relations) to find the refuge of “home” in the great outdoors. He identifies an itinerary of coolth that includes local breezes such as the “Dee Why doctor,” which he can catch as he sits with his feet in the river. Frustratingly, access to overnight camping by the river, a social cooling practice Gareth grew up with, is now deemed risky and has been banned, so he must eventually return to that maladapted house that has been baking in the sun all day.
Iris starts the day in her Riverwood community early, before the heat starts to rise. She leads a troupe of resident dancers who use the shady central courtyard of the multi-unit development where they live to practice their routine. While their fan dance may have originated in China, the dancers performing here hail from Central Europe, the Middle East, and the islands of the Pacific. This courtyard affords a style of coolth that manifests a synchronous community. The group winds down from their dancing by having their morning coffee in the air conditioned common room that extends out into the courtyard. Through the glass, they can see the bustle of another resident group starting to arrange equipment for the barbecue that will take place later in the day and attract a much wider group of residents to the courtyard. There is no indoor cooking on these hot nights.
These two very different stories offer a glimpse into the diverse rhythms and paces of social cooling practices, but also to the ways in which coolth needs to be constantly negotiated or created in places where it’s often denied or blocked. By listening and conversing with residents who are actively engaged in “climate adaptation” every day, we can come to understand the practical cooling expertise that people already possess, which is often difficult to put into words and is therefore sometimes in danger of being overlooked.
While we can make these practices visible and sharable through story, making them durable as commons, capable of being defended or advocated for, requires further work. We’ve traveled with groups of residents to cool outdoor spaces in the natural and built environment to gauge how accessible and useful they are to diverse and aging bodies, and in the process enumerated what’s needed to support the comfortable recurrence of such excursions on hot days. We’ve also extended existing social events, like the resident-led weekly barbecue at Riverwood that’s been running every Friday for a dozen years, by adding a cultural festival of cool foods derived from the residents’ diverse backgrounds. But the key task is to connect with housing providers, local councils, and state governments to make coolth visible and coherent as a living resource that must be accommodated, and to amplify the shared custodial responsibility it requires.
Our interest in “coolth” stems from a recognition that the question of how to live well with the heat is a defining one for our age. As humanity has already passed the 1.5 degrees of warming line in the sand, we cannot avoid it. And, despite the impetus to enclose, we cannot avoid being together. For the late Lauren Berlant, being together means suffering the “inconvenience” of other people.10 For us, it means being sensitive to the diverse rhythms of our “being-in-common.”11 Moving about natural and built environments with others allows one to experience how differences in age, physical capacity, neurodiversity, psychosocial comfort, and more dictate speed and direction. Likewise, even where there is goodwill, differences in language and culture can result in misunderstanding. Changing the speed of life and negotiating our differences while continuing to be together is, as Berlant puts it, a function of “a comic sense of the pleasure of coming together once again.”12 Commoning, in this sense, is a politics of “making solidarity” as an end in itself. In solidarity we shoulder the risks together, to help one another cope with the bad without ceding a future we want.13
Glyn Wittwer and Robert Waschik, “Estimating the economic impacts of the 2017–2019 drought and 2019–2020 bushfires on regional NSW and the rest of Australia,” Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 65, no. 4 (2021): 918–36; Proloy Deb et al., “Causes of the widespread 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season,” Earth's Future 8, no. 11 (2020): e2020EF001671; and Nicki Hutley et al., “Uninsurable nation: Australia's most climate-vulnerable places,” Climate Council, 2022.
Rohan Fisher, “Vastly Bigger Than the Black Summer: 84 Million Hectares of Northern Australia Burned in 2023,” The Conversation, April 23, 2024, ➝.
Dawei Li et al., “Escalating global exposure to compound heat-humidity extremes with warming,” Environmental Research Letters 15, no. 6 (2020): 064003. While heat risk is frequently framed in relation to outdoor exposure, heat can be dangerous to human health indoors at much lower temperatures, with 29 degrees Celsius as a general agreed upon safe limit for indoor temperature. See ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 55, Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy, 2023.
Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, “Weathering,” Feminist Review 118 (2018): 80–84. “Weathering” as the progressive impacts of multiple life stressors on health and wellbeing was a concept first explored by public health scholar, Aline Geronimus (see Arline T. Geronimus, “The Weathering Hypothesis and the Health of African-American Women and Infants: evidence and speculations,” Ethnicity & Disease (1992): 207–22).
Abby Mellick Lopes and Stephen Healy, “Cultivating the habits of coolth,” in Assembling and Governing Habits, ed. Tony Bennett et al. (London: Routledge, 2021), 97–115.
Alice Rawsthorn, host, Design Emergency, podcast, season 4, episode 2, “Philippe Rahm on Climatic Architecture,” October 2, 2024, ➝.
See also Samuel Bloch, “Shade,” Places Journal (April 2019), ➝.
➝.
Ronald. J. Horvath, “Machine space,” Geographical Review 64, no. 2 (1974): 167–88.
Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 260.
Ulrich Beck, “Politics of Risk Society,” in Environmentalism: Critical Concepts in the Environment, ed. David Pepper et al. (London: Routledge, 2003), 256–66.
