Over at FRK Lenore's posted the ever popular

[conuly]

"A World After Air Conditioning". Or whatever the title is, I'm not checking it.

And about three or four people have popped up specifically to say that life in Phoenix, Arizona would be impossible without air conditioning. (Several other people have observed that it'd simply be unbearable if people built houses to suit the climate.)

And you know, while I sympathize, I have to ask: If it's really unreasonable for the average person in good health to be expected to weather normal, well, weather in an area without intense technological assistance... should we really be living there in the first place?

Admittedly, I ask this while living in a city where we've fit lots and lots of people here using advanced technology such as elevators, but somehow that strikes me as different. (And I'm not saying nobody should ever use air conditioning either, exactly.... I'm not sure what I'm saying, other than that the city of Phoenix is not, in and of itself, a justification for the invention.)

Comments

[pne]

If it's really unreasonable for the average person in good health to be expected to weather normal, well, weather in an area without intense technological assistance... should we really be living there in the first place?

That's a good question, I think.

Another good question is whether we should be living in places that are known to play host to natural disasters regularly (such as flood plains) - and then wonder when the flood plain, well, floods. (Or a volcano explodes, or nature does what it always does and you knew it before you moved there.)

[redbird]

From another angle: different places have different risks. A chunk of the problem is that the population that is particularly moving to places like Phoenix is also particularly prone to find heat dangerous. But "This is not the right place for retirement communities" is a different statement than "this is not a place people should live."

[adrian_turtle]

I am increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that cities should be built for "the average person in good health." It's only in the last few decades that I've started to live in a world that even tries to be accessible for people with disabilities. (I can remember when curb cuts and wheelchair ramps looked strange, because I saw them so infrequently.)

How many people are really in good health, with respect to their ability to cope with heat? Old age makes a person more vulnerable to both heat and cold. Diabetes and high blood pressure increase the risks of heat-related illness. (Both conditions are increasingly common.) Many medications have side effects that reduce ability to tolerate temperature extremes. And some medications were designed for hospital or nursing home use, where they could be stored at controlled room temperature...they can't be refrigerated, and they degrade very quickly above 90F.

Building to suit the climate is reasonable. Building non-air-conditioned homes that are unsafe for people in poor health is not...even there is air-conditioning in the hospitals and nursing homes. It's not just Phoenix and Los Angeles, though if you want to talk about them, you have to think about what it would mean to displace the millions of people who live there now. Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Baltimore have long hot summers, too. And we aren't thinking about it at the beginning of May, but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal tend to get miserably hot in July and August.

[conuly]

I'm not suggesting we get rid of air conditioners. I do think, however, that building in a place that most people (as compared to a minority of the population, who ought to have them regardless) can't survive without air conditioners is unreasonable unless you have a compelling reason to put your town there - say, a big port or something.

And no, I don't see the point of destroying the cities now either. I just don't think "Well, Phoenix would be unlivable without air conditioning" is as good a justification for air conditioning as "Many medications ahve side effects that reduce ability to tolerate temperature extremes". That, which is a reasonable argument, didn't come up even once. Phoenix specifically came up at least five times last I checked.

[conuly]

Of course, that population also finds slipping on ice dangerous as well.

I do hope I didn't sound like I was saying "Dudes, don't move to Phoenix" though. Maybe "Don't build Phoenix again!" but it's already there.

[beezelbubbles.livejournal.com]

I grew up in South Texas without air conditioning. Yes, I know it's not the same as Phoenix, we're just as hot but with humidity, too. Personally, I like air conditioning, but if I've got fans, or windows that can catch the breeze (the often non-existent breeze), then I'm fine. What I don't understand is how anyone ever lived through a Minnesota winter before heaters were a thing. I will take an non-ac Texas summer over a non-heated MN winter any day.

[leora.livejournal.com]

My guess is it involved lots of burning things for heat. Also, people dying of the cold isn't exactly uncommon. For that matter, nor is people dying from heat. Healthy people tend to make it through the extremes of season, but without technology assisting, it's not that surprising if you lose some of the sicker and elderly people each summer and winter. I think that was pretty much taken as the norm. It was quite possibly one of the causes for high child mortality, but I'm totally guessing here, and I only really mean that for the really young ones, babies really, since it takes a little time for the body to get all the systems fully functioning, you don't want to get hit with a really bad winter or summer before you're more developed. But childhood disease was likely far worse.

But I do think people tended to try to adjust how they lived to be a bit more sensible to the weather, and it'd be nice if we did more of that. Although I sometimes I am tempted to heat my house with logs, since we have a fire place and sometimes it is cold. But then people remind me that it'll be smokey and not good for the air quality, so I probably shouldn't use that as supplemental heating. It is likely not nearly as efficient as our gas heating is.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

If everyone moved to the mountains, there'd be no room for trees. Better more people stay in the desert where trees don't grow anyway.

Even old houses built for the environment (high ceilings, wide verandas, etc) get dreadfully hot. Of course the real solution is to develop good solar technology to convert the heat to electricity.

In the meantime we might distinguish the types of air-conditioning.

Refrigerated ac uses a lot of electricity to run machinery that adds considerable heat to the outdoors (compressors etc).

Evaporative ac uses much less electricity to pump water through wick-type pads and run a fan to circulate the cooled air inside. Some cool air escapes into the outdoors; the pump is cooled by the water itself.

'Kas' system used in India does the same thing with less or no electricity. The water trickles down from a reservoir on the roof.
Hanging a wet towel across the window gets the same effect.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I've never understood why people would choose to live somewhere that's either unpleasant or dangerous, given a choice - and given the sheer size of the USA, you've got a lot of choice out there! There's usually something about the location that makes it worth the bad side - gold mines, diamond mines, a crossing point on a river, the fertile valleys next to volcanos (that's why Italians lived next to Etna despite getting covered in molten lava ever now and then).

Do these places that require air-con for normal survival have something special going for them?

[amarafox.livejournal.com]

I lived in Perth, Western Australia without air conditioning. It's all about the house construction.

Rather than wood frame, plaster and siding, the houses in Perth were almost all double brick walls, with an airspace between for insulation. We had slate floors, which were cool in the summer and a metal, reflective roof to bounce the heat away.

Were there some days where the heat was assy? Of course. We just slept downstairs, rather than upstairs, where it was cooler.

[lakidaa.livejournal.com]

Houston is one of the world's biggest ports. It is so ridiculously important.

I live there. It's a swamp.

And moving is something that is hard to do- not just inertia, but cost. I can't up and move out of the gulf coast- I don't have the money! I'd have to empty my savings account to get out of dodge.

[conuly]

I don't know what compelled people to build Phoenix, honestly. I'm thinking maybe the desert climate was good for allergy sufferers?

[leora.livejournal.com]

I suspect a lot of unpleasant environments got settled by poor people who couldn't afford to live in better places, but the land was free in the nastier places. You have to live somewhere, so they settled for what they could get. Then once you have people there, you have inertia, and you have the difficulty of moving, and you start to get things that make the place nice.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

living in a city where we've fit lots and lots of people here using advanced technology such as elevators

Hee. Snort. Chuckle.

*ahem* Yes, everyone ALWAYS claims their own place is somehow "different".

That said, I agree that many places were and are simply uninhabitable by any reasonable standard of living without creating artificial climates. (Here, of course, is different--we have no extreme temperatures to deal with, just excess precip., and drainage is relatively easy and low-tech.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

In the southwest US, old adobe houses with thick walls were cooler than modern houses.

[conuly]

Several people made that exact point, that Phoenix specifically would be much more habitable if the buildings were built to the climate.

[conuly]

Thing is, if we didn't have skyscrapers there'd still be people living in NYC. Less people, sure, and no doubt there'd still be that yearly trek to the Catskills for summer (because if we're getting rid of skyscrapers we may as well go whole hog and ditch the AC as well), but those left behind in the muggy weather would still be capable of, well, surviving the weather.