Assembling high-rise: The uneven agencies of air in suburban densification in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the surface the critical qualities of air – airflow, ventilation, particulates etc. – in relation to the well-being of people living in high-rise. Engineering and architectural research has burgeoned in response. However, in focusing on models of airflow, ventilation and particulates as discrete variables, engineering and architectural discourse fails to capture the diverse ways that air enters into and shapes the everyday lived experience of high-rise dwelling. Drawing on research in Sydney’s Southwestern suburbs, we reveal high-rise as an assemblage that links apartment dwelling with air, via car-dependent suburbanisation, pollution and climate-change induced temperature extremes in the Anthropocene. In addition to viruses, air teems with carbon, insects, noise and pollutants, while viscerally mediating human encounters with fluctuating temperatures. Multiple relations between people, buildings and air unfold simultaneously, confounding attempts to account for air’s elemental milieu through single variables like greenhouse gas or COVID-19. While embedded in relations of power, high-rise assemblages unleash vernacular adaptation that through low-tech and low-cost technologies work to connect suburban high-rise with evolving ecological systems. Recognising the pharmacological quality of air, as both ‘poison’ and ‘cure’, we contrast models of high-rise as encapsulated environments with resident (and other) experiments that orient high-rise to the elements, and the interlinked challenges of urban living in the Anthropocene.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic draws attention to air as a vital but potentially harmful dimension of urban environments. It has brought to the surface the critical qualities of air – airflow, ventilation, particulates etc. – and their impacts on the lived experience of high-rise urban living. Pandemic adaptation efforts require engagement with a more-than-human world that is agentic, indifferent and exploitative of human life. Like other elements, air unsettles modern presumptions that natural and cultural worlds are autonomous, revealing residential high-rise as an assemblage of social and natural materials and processes that are emergent, malleable and unpredictable. Indeed, high-rise dwellings have been of particular concern in the pandemic due to the concentration of people in close proximity, activating concerns around health and density (McFarlane, 2023). However, in addition to COVID-19, air and high-rise are implicated in a range of atmospheric systems, that through human impacts on the Earth, have been irreversibly transformed (Castree, 2014). Coined by earth scientists as the epochal ‘Anthropocene’, the impacts of global warming, climate change, pollution and airborne pathogens on high-rise dwelling are not well understood. Yet densifying middle and outer suburbs in many cities will bear a significant proportion of population growth in the Anthropocene (Maginn and Anacker, 2022; Navarrete-Hernandez et al., 2022; Phelps et al., 2023). Whether and how high-rise can support more-than-human flourishing is a critical question facing rapidly densifying suburbs, and the key focus of this paper.

Studies of densification have previously considered air in relation to climate change mitigation, such as the benefits of compact cities in reducing demand for fossil-fuel based transport and the energy performance of high-rise buildings. Measures of human air interactions and engagements in air sciences and indoor engineering have reached striking levels of precision, documenting for instance, levels of human comfort with respect to embodied responses to inside air temperature and circulation (de Dear et al., 2018). These controlled experiments in support of climate change mitigation are nonetheless removed from the relational character and diverse materialities of air, that pose multiple interconnected and ongoing challenges for urban dwelling. Indeed, the multiplicities of air (including pollutants, climate extremes and virus) transcend stylised scientific models that in focusing on single variables, remove air from its elemental milieu and the uneven politics of socially differentiated burdens. Social scientific analysis of heatwave fatalities for instance, reveals that elemental competencies and capacities of high-rise buildings shape human vulnerability in disasters (Keller, 2013). These limitations gain particular relevance in outer suburban contexts in Sydney, the focus of this article, that are zoned for unwanted land uses (e.g. waste processing), criss-crossed by major roads and highways and that have fared poorly in COVID-19 with widespread lockdowns (Iveson and Sisson, 2023). As climate change exacerbates a range of airy hazards, alongside pandemic and energy efficiency, it is pertinent to understand how suburban high-rise serves residents engaged in the diverse and power-laden processes of adaptation in the Anthropocene.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and home tours with residents living in high-rise in Liverpool Central Business District, a town centre in Sydney’s Southwestern suburbs, this article aims to understand how air and its diverse materialities co-produce high-rise dwelling in densifying town centres. A critical site in accommodating Sydney’s future population growth, yet experiencing the highest concentrations of pollution and particulate matter in metropolitan Sydney (Doctors for the Environment, 2018), Liverpool is an apposite case for examining interconnected challenges of air, climate change and industrialisation in the context of suburban densification. In bringing air and high-rise into dialogue, we seek to foreground high-rise as a socio-ecological assemblage that links apartment dwelling to air via car-dependent suburbanisation, pollution and climate-change induced temperature extremes in the Anthropocene. Leveraging conceptual tools from assemblage thinking and elemental geography (Adey, 2015; Engelmann, 2015), we pay attention to the ways that global environmental change comes to matter in the place-based and embodied context of high-rise dwelling. We remain attuned to vernacular resident engagement/adaptation within these processes to better understand the evolution of densifying suburbs and the ecologies in which high-rise dwellings are embedded.

With these goals in mind, our paper aims to answer three interlinked questions: how the interconnected dilemmas of air in the Anthropocene come to matter in the embodied process of high-rise dwelling; whether and how high-rise engage with these challenges; and the emergent verticalities that result. In so doing, we are guided by Head and Gibson’s (2012: 703) observation that productive conversations can be nurtured across relational philosophies and the sciences including through work ‘that places in situ, humans, technologies and such nonhuman entities as a cooling breeze’.

We begin by situating research on high-rise and densification within a wider literature on the elemental and cultural geographies of air. Foregrounding air as an agentic force ‘in the composition of landscape, social conditions and subjectivities’ (Engelmann, 2015: 441) we highlight the synergies between elemental approaches and the concept of assemblage that in urban geography has been used to interrogate the heterogenous and processual character of high-rise. We deploy these perspectives to centre residents' everyday and sensuous encounters with air as a critical vantage point from which to observe the capacities of high-rise dwelling to meet the atmospheric challenges of the Anthropocene. Second, we introduce our case study site, Liverpool town centre in Sydney’s Southwestern suburbs, ear-marked for increasing densification and population growth in an era of environmental transformation. Next, we set-out our research methods, comprising of semi-structured interviews and home-tours with residents living in high-rise in Liverpool town centre, and introduce the participants in our study. Three analytic sections follow, illuminating the multiplicity of air’s materialities, encompasing sound, temperature, particulate matter, condensation, mould and insects; the failure of building infrastructures and apartment design to accommodate the oppositional character of these substantiations; and residents’ low-tech, low-cost adaptations to more flexibly screen, cool and ventilate their homes. To conclude, we locate an emerging paradigm of high-rise architecture for the Anthropocene in the vernacular adaptations of residents in densifying town centres.

High-rise and elemental geographies: Thinking with assemblage

Neither fixed nor immaterial, Choy (2011) argues that air has been ‘untethered’ in social scientific research and overlooked in social theory. Poised between the elemental and the cultural, air is not only vital to sustaining life but, through its role in energy generation, underpins processes of industrialisation and consumption and their impacts (e.g. pollution), that in turn shape the conditions for urban growth. Holding ‘many forms of substance’ (Choy, 2011: 165) air comprises diverse ‘atmospheric experiences’ (p. 145) including ‘dust, oxygen, dioxin, smell, particular matter, visibility, humidity, heat, and various gases’ (p. 145) that aggregate in diverse materialities, ‘breath, humidity, SARS, particulate and so forth’ (p. 145). Recognising air ‘as it blows across town, across borders, across disciplines’ (p. 165), Choy’s account is indicative of the post-human shift in the social sciences where cities are increasingly recognised as ecological and social assemblages (Swyngedouw, 2006). This paradigm shift in urban research illuminates the elemental in the social and vice versa (Steele and Wiesel, 2014). Like other non-human elements, air encompasses global political, environmental and social processes, as well as the embodied experiences of daily life.

The growing significance of climate change, pollution and pandemic, have produced a range of scholarly interventions around air and urban environments. Recognising the capacities of air to combine with different substances through relations of attraction and repulsion, and with oppositional qualities (e.g. heat/cold, dry/moist), elemental approaches conceptualise air as a state of ‘compositional suspension’ (Adey, 2015: 60). Phenomenological perspectives further centre air as an elemental force that contributes to affective atmospheres that envelop, expand and contract urban conditions in the co-production of landscapes and subjectivities that unsettle the distinctions between air, city and body (Adey, 2013; Anderson, 2009; Engelmann, 2015; Ghertner, 2020; Tripathy and McFarlane, 2022). Through the process of breathing, air challenges idealised conceptualisations of the body as an ‘imagined space of purity’ (Balayannis and Garnett, 2020: 6; Bickerstaff and Walker, 2003; Engelmann, 2015; Peterson, 2021), and bounded understandings of ‘inside/outside’, foregrounding air as an agentic force ‘in the composition of landscape, social conditions and subjectivities’ (Engelmann, 2015: 441; Ingold, 2010; Ruiz and Jue, 2021). Rejecting universalising narratives of crisis and collapse, elemental approaches foreground the intricate socio-natures of anthropogenic climate and environmental change.

Recent accounts of high-rise with respect to the Anthropocene underscore the agencies of air in shaping densifying environments. Atmospheric carbon manifesting as sea level rise means condominiums in low-lying cities on permeable foundations, such as Miami’s limestone in the US, are subject to routine flooding and increasingly ‘swallowed by the century’s rising seas’ (Wakefield, 2022: 924). Melting permafrost dissolves high-rise foundations, producing cracked and sinking apartments in Arctic cities (Luhn, 2016), while a toxic cocktail of wildfire smoke, particle pollution and smog overpower thin ventilation and circulation of high-rise in outer-suburban precincts (Holden, 2019; McManus, 2021). These encounters between air and high-rise point to multiple, interconnected challenges of the Anthropocene that transcend the search for thermal efficiency that dominates scientific debate and architectural interventions. High-rise is entangled with the particulates of urbanisation, industrialisation and suburbanisation, through which both global warming and pandemic render urban subjects and built forms vulnerable to evolutionary pressures, compelling new vertical imaginaries (Ebbensgaard et al., 2022; Wakefield, 2022). Within a single molecule, air connects us to bushfire, car-dependencies and urban heat islands in densifying suburbs directing attention to the ‘solidifying and melting edges between people, regions, and events’ (Choy, 2011: 145). Residential apartment buildings actively enter into these relationships by ‘texturing’ air through design, infrastructure and fixtures that collectively exaggerate or dampen sound (Barber, 2020; Kerr et al., 2018; Power, 2015), light (Ebbensgaard, 2022), pathogen ecologies (Wakefield-Rann, 2021) and affective atmospheres (Dorignon and Nethercote, 2021). These airy networks are a co-production of material and immaterial worlds, compelling an analytic framework that can hold seemingly disparate elements and places in relation.

We deploy assemblage thinking to understand the complex intersection of air and high-rise in the Anthropocene, foregrounding the heterogenous elements and relations through which phenomena come together and fall apart (Baker and McGuirk, 2017). Resisting hegemonic conceptualisations of the ‘social’, assemblage recognises the agencies of more-than-human actants in the continual structuring of emergent subjectivities, places and territories and their provisional, emergent character (Cook et al., 2016; Jacobs, 2012). Inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS), cultural and urban geographers have located the globally uneven proliferation of high-rise within the place-based, technical and (sometimes) mundane processes of building design, maintenance and repair (Jacobs and Cairns, 2011; Jacobs et al., 2012). While attuned to the ways more-than-human moulds, birds, plants and rodents shape building maintenance regimes (Jacobs and Merriman, 2011), these literatures have paid less attention to the simplification of high-rise, that through air-conditioned encapsulation, has become a globally replicable vehicle of fossil-fuel consumption and capital accumulation (Barber, 2020).

Indeed, the dominant model of high-rise as an enclosed, air-conditioned environment conceals more diverse architectural traditions. As Barber (2020) argues, early 20th-century high-rise deployed a diverse network of terraces, mesh balustrades, exhaust flues, ventilation, sun-rooms, louvers, external shading devices, screens and jalousies ‘as a strategy of climate adaptability’ (Barber, 2020: 10). Unsettling the boundary between inside/outside, these pre-air-conditioned architectures foreground the permeability of high-rise that as Ebbensgaard (2022) illustrates in relation to light, transcends the boundary between interior/exterior and intimate/distant. While critical urban geographers have increasingly conceptualised high-rise with respect to extractive economies, linking vertical air rights and terraforming practices to transnational capitalism and city competition (McNeill, 2020; Ruming et al., 2021), the emergent spaces and subjects of an expanded post-humanist, elemental geography of high-rise remain less well understood.

Recognising the capacities of air to structure social and political life, elemental approaches remain attentive to the diverse substantiations and territorialisations of air, beyond singular concerns for greenhouse gas generation and visions of climate catastrophe. Rather than a passive receptacle for industrial capitalism, air and atmosphere are recognised as ‘tangible forces’ shaping cities, landscapes and subjectivities (Engelmann, 2015: 441). Like chemicals, air is ‘never entirely good nor bad’ (Balayannis and Garnett, 2020: 1), opening the potential for experimental and inventive practices of adaptation. Attuned to the co-production of diverse processes and elements through and across territories, bodies and place, assemblage finds critical resonance with the material-affective atmospheres (Adey, 2013) and city-body geographies characterising the elemental turn (Choy, 2011; Engelmann, 2015; Irigaray and Marder, 2014; Straughan et al., 2022). The fusion of assemblage with elemental geographies thus challenges us to ask how the interconnected dilemmas of air in the Anthropocene come to matter in the embodied process of high-rise dwelling.

Power, place and emergent densification

The answers to these questions are geographical and political. Elemental high-rise is entangled with uneven politics of environmental risk and harm. Reviewing analysis of fatalities in the Chicago 1995 heatwave for instance, Graham (2015) notes those without air conditioning, living near the black, bitumined roofs of city housing ‘projects’ on the South side, ‘quite literally baked’ (p. 198). Keller’s (2013) analysis of the 2003 European heatwave revealed the ‘unclaimed dead’ lived in smaller apartments, traditionally for domestic workers, with shared bathrooms and limited cooling, that for Graham (2015: 198), were the ‘killing zones in Paris’s 2003 heat wave’. Cultural anthropologists have observed the boundaries around ‘good air’ enjoyed for instance, by Hong Kong elites in the high-rise of Peak and Mid-Level neighbourhoods, with the ‘smog and dust under flyovers’ endured by the poor at street level (Choy, 2011; Harris, 2018). Indeed, the relationship between toxic air and social inequality is so entrenched that environmental economists have developed a term for marginalised subjects –‘breathers’– to describe those who ‘accrue the unaccounted-for costs that attend the production and consumption of goods and services, such as the injuries, medical expenses, and changes in climate and ecosystems’ (Choy, 2011: 146). A multitude of studies now reveal uneven impacts of COVID-19 by income and ethnicity within cities (Iveson and Sisson, 2023) and between cities of the Global North and South (Bhan et al., 2020). These political economies of air point not only to the failures of social and physical infrastructures to engage with airy extremes across interlinked global challenges, but also to the intensification of citizen risk as a condition for housing affordability. They readily reveal the potential for technical accounts of air to become depoliticised and positivistic (Graham, 2015), concealing the uneven expression of environmental harm as the interests of elites intensify (rather than retreat) in response to societal-wide crises (Davison, 2016).

Residents nonetheless modify dwellings to better meet the complexities of dwelling in the Anthropocene. Cultural geographers show how residents rework spaces, materials and temporalities to serve social networks and community outcomes, conceptualising high-rise as an emergent process whose character is open to modification and variation through resident and material agencies (Baxter, 2017; Ebbensgaard, 2022; Ghosh, 2014; Kerr et al., 2021). Strengers and Maller (2017) show how international students in Melbourne deploy homemade hot water bottles, thick socks, hot drinks, electric mattresses, heaters, blankets and daily routines (e.g. drinking hot water in the morning) to render poorly insulated and heated apartments more tolerable in winter (see also de Vet and Head, 2020). Mellick-Lopes et al. (2018: 49) similarly reveal low-tech cooling solutions of residents in Western Sydney including wet sheets to insulate cool spaces for children or setting a fan behind frozen water in heatwaves. These material readjustments and incremental changes are understood as household adaptive capacities in the context of climate change (Gibson et al., 2013). While empirical studies caution against overly celebratory assessment of household capacities (Farbotko and Waitt, 2011), they also compel greater consideration of everyday practices as sites of innovation and change.

The question of whether multi-unit housing is up to the task of dwelling in the Anthropocene is a critical question for suburban nations, whose housing supply will be increasingly met through multi-unit housing (Ruming and Fingland, 2021; Young and Keil, 2014). Unlike the low-density suburban sprawl of the Post WWII era, suburban densification in many cities is taking place in the context of the Anthropocene full tilt. Questions of social equity that already circulate in relation to densification and housing supply (cf. Ebbensgaard, 2022; Troy et al., 2020) are playing out in suburbs that are warmer, more polluted and more vulnerable to pandemic than at any point in human occupation. These interlinked atmospheric challenges are particularly acute in Sydney’s outer-suburban town centres that already bear the brunt of industrial and waste zoning, car-dependency and global warming (Doctors for the Environment, 2018). While apartment living is often associated with an escape from the ‘ground level’, it is also embedded in mobile and place-based ecological contexts and airy toxicities. Before examining whether and how the high-rise housing stock in Western Sydney is ‘acclimatised’ to these surroundings, and the implications for residents and densifying suburbs, we next introduce the case study, method and participants.

Case study: Liverpool Central Business District (CBD), southwestern Sydney

The Central Business District (CBD) of the suburb of Liverpool in Sydney is the key focus of our work. In the polynucleated vision of the Greater Sydney Commission, the Liverpool CBD (population 27,000) is the ‘Western City’ whose population is expected to double by 2036. Along with the larger Liverpool Local Government Area (LGA) (population 202,000), Liverpool CBD comprises a culturally and linguistically diverse population (68.9% overseas born), with a large cohort of families with children in apartments (Cook et al., 2023) and has been identified as a site for significant population growth in the next two decades. To accommodate this growth, Liverpool City Council has revised planning controls to facilitate high-density residential towers, supported by transport planning connecting the CBD to the new Western Sydney Airport. The airport is approximately 25 km from the town centre of Liverpool and the subject of significant transport, housing and infrastructure planning underpinned by powerful discourses of economic growth and a 24-hour economy (PriceWaterHouseCoopers, 2017).

Sustainability concerns in promotional and policy discourses emphasise the need for renewable, (ideally on-site) energy generation to protect the airport against global energy disruptions (PriceWaterHouseCoopers, 2017). However, bounded by major roads and freeways, Liverpool has the highest level of fine-particle pollution in both Greater Sydney and the state New South Wales (NSW) (Doctors for the Environment, 2018). These toxicities are set to increase with an estimated 10,000 additional heavy truck movements (diesel powered), linked to the Moorebank intermodal freight transfer station servicing food exports to Asia (PriceWaterHouseCoopers, 2017). These toxic particulates mingle with layers of smoke that collect across Sydney’s south and west, fuelled by increasingly prevalent bushfire seasons that in 2019 burned continuously, ‘smothering Sydney’ (McManus, 2021). The combined toxicity of particulates is enhanced by temperature gradients that, as elsewhere, are mapped to socio-economic inequalities (Santamouris et al., 2017), a pattern that intensified through the COVID-19 associated lockdowns that impacted high-rise residents in particular (Young, 2021).

Amid this context, residents make high-rise home. In some respects apartment dwellers are ‘floating’ (Straughan et al., 2022) between the modernity of the high-rise and its apparent command/autonomy over the industrial, urbanised landscape of the city, and the challenges of the Anthropocene. While theorists of post-suburbanisation have flagged the discrepancies in infrastructure provision in areas that like Liverpool, incorporate ‘attributes of centrality’ into the suburbs (Charmes and Keil, 2015: 590), these are places that are already thoroughly inhabited by diverse households and whose governance and infrastructure failures are already woven into daily life. In 2016 for instance, 50% of apartments in the Liverpool CBD were occupied by families (Cook et al., 2023), and, as per Australian Government regulations, were built to low thermal performance standards (Oldfield, 2022). Apartment construction in Sydney (and Australian cities) more generally has been characterised by widespread building defects (Cook and Taylor, 2023) while energy efficiency standards are poorly adapted for residential high-rise (Thomas, 2023).

Research methods: Semi-structured interviews and home tours

To better understand how air and its diverse materialities co-produce high-rise dwelling in the Anthropocene we draw on in-depth qualitative interviews and home tours with ten apartment-dwellers residing in Liverpool CBD who participated in a pilot-study examining households’ apartment and neighbourhood preferences and experiences (Cook et al., 2020). Participants were recruited via a letterbox drop within the Liverpool CBD boundaries, and social media and flyers that were displayed in Library and Council buildings.

Among participants, seven out of ten identified as female, three as male; and seven out of ten were born overseas (in Cameroon, Iraq, China, Iran and Bangladesh). This reflects the cultural diversity of the town centre more broadly where 69% of residents were born overseas (compared to 43% overseas born for Greater Sydney and 35% for the State of NSW). Six out of ten participants lived with their partners and children and one was a young adult in a family. Two participants were under 25 years of age, four were aged in their 30s, three in their 40s and one participant was aged in their early 60s. All but one household had one full-time worker and no-one we interviewed was working full-time, including three participants who were unemployed. Overall, the sample is of lower socio-economic status.

Semi-structured, qualitative interviews were undertaken in conjunction with home and neighbourhood tours over a period of approximately 90 minutes. The interview schedule was divided into six sections exploring apartment likes and dislikes, housing careers and aspirations, financial home values, neighbourhood values, experiences and perceptions of common spaces, and demographic data. We have reported elsewhere on the changing housing careers and aspirations of families living in high-rise in suburban town centres (Cook et al., 2023). In the present paper, we draw particularly on participants’ discussion of what they liked and disliked about their apartments, including direct prompts about the thermal and sound performance of their homes. We pay particular attention to how air manifests viscerally in these accounts; and the materials, places and environments enfolded in these encounters.

In what follows we mobilise assemblage thinking to advance understandings of air and high-rise dwelling via three trajectories. First, centring more-than-human agencies we pay attention to participants’ visceral encounters with air’s diverse substantiations (e.g. noise, temperature, insects) to develop ‘thick descriptions’ of invisible yet forceful high-rise atmospheres (Edensor, 2012). Recognising both the diverse ways that air is sensed and registered by participants, as well as the broader social and ecological environments that via air, are suspended in these encounters, we reveal high-rise as a socio-ecological assemblage linking diverse geographies of car-dependent suburbanisation, pollution and climate-change induced temperature extremes to high-rise dwelling in the Anthropocene. Second, recognising the capacities of buildings to texture air through design (Kerr et al., 2018; Power, 2015), we foreground the infrastructures, fixtures and orientations that co-produce high-rise dwelling. Third, noting the emergent qualities of assemblage we pay particular attention to participants’ everyday strategies of adaptation. While the uneven provision of high-rise infrastructures contributes to a sense of immobilisation and disorientation for some participants, infrastructure gaps also propel low-tech and low-cost heating, cooling and screening solutions that diffuse oppressive micro-climates.

High-rise residents’ multi-sensual encounters with air

For Mahgol, airy encounters bring apartment dwelling, temperature extremes and physical and psychological capacities into relation. Living with her mother in a two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of an apartment block (built circa 2000), Mahgol described her experience of summer as ‘discomforting’ conceding ‘you just sweat’ to a point where: ‘I can’t do anything’. While warm temperatures are common in the Eastern Australian summer, in 2020, Western Sydney experienced 37 days with temperatures of 35°C and over (Taylor, 2022) with temperatures 8–10°C warmer than Eastern Sydney during heatwaves (Melville-Rea, 2022). Managing complex health challenges, the porosity of Mahgol’s home is exacerbated by the seasonal proliferation of cockroaches whose unruly presence and disruptive flight interrupts her sleep so that Mahgol concedes ‘I am worried now again, ‘cause summer comes, about the cockroaches, what can I do?’ Discomfort is present too, in the dust, smoke and pollution that permeate clothes drying outside; and the noise of traffic from the nearby Hume Highway that only subsides for Mahgol late into the night:

At 12 o’clock I feel quiet, other than that, no, because of the cars passing. And sometimes the kids, the neighbours. But if I sleep late and then you get up late in the morning, I can’t.

Against air’s diverse qualities and materialities, the autonomy of Mahgol’s modern ground floor brick home unravels, creating a place of subtle and consistent torment. With limited housing options afforded her refugee status, air presses in on Mahgol’s psyche and her body, creating material and affective atmosphere of worry, immobilisation, sleeplessness and fear. In the colder months, the air cools in the poorly insulated home, mould envelopes the wooden bathroom and air grips her chest so that Mahgol can ‘feel infection’, conceding that ‘I was sick for two, three weeks because of the air, the air I was feeling was not clean’.

While Mahgol’s account illustrates the indivisibility of ecological and socio-economic inequalities in high-rise housing markets, it also reveals the multiplicity of air’s materialities: air heats and cools, it carries insects and bacteria, dust and pollution, sound and noise. These materials co-produce the sensorial experience of apartment dwelling that coalesce into an affective atmosphere of immobilisation (‘I can’t do anything’) and disorientation (‘what can I do?’) (cf. Dorignon and Nethercote, 2021). Thus, while air science labours to abstract air from atmosphere – to pin-point one characteristic, isolate it from its context and create a set of generalisations about this characteristic – Mahgol’s account underscores the plurality of air and its ongoing, relational character.

Building infrastructures and the mediation of air in high-rise homes

High-rise materialities and infrastructures have a role to play in shaping these affective atmospheres. As Power (2015) and Kerr et al. (2018) argue in relation to sound, lift shafts, stairs, ducts, floors and wall cavities can exaggerate and exacerbate tensions in apartment living, and have a bearing on dwelling, governance and health (Baker and Bentley, 2023). In foregrounding the multi-sensual experiences of residents, our research adds thermal, insect and particulate matters to these existing analyses, linking evolving ecological processes to health, housing and home. Through the prism of air, the boundary between outside sensory disruption and indoor space is unsettled, revealing the contradictions and tensions of ‘increasingly different airs’ (Garnett, 2020: 55) in the Anthropocene.

These contradictions are captured by Sarah, who relocated from Northern Australia to train for a medical role at Liverpool Hospital. Sarah works part-time while caring for her two-year-old child and lives in a new, two-bedroom apartment that she owns with her husband. Reflecting on the challenge of separating cool night air from mosquitoes that discern human blood type, lactic acid and CO₂ in order to harvest protein for their eggs, Sarah recalled:

We did open the doors a couple of times, the mosquitos would get in and they would attack the baby. Like one time, she had 20 bites on her head one night . . . and that was when we realised no, we’re just gonna have to put the air con on.

Sarah’s account illuminates the pharmacological quality of air as cool and biting: simultaneously desirable and undesirable; necessary and uncomfortable (cf. Balayannis and Garnett, 2020; Bissell, 2018; Engelmann, 2015). While the modern housing system was predicated on designating and separating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nature (Kaika, 2004), residents’ multi-sensual encounters with air reveal the contingent character of this separation. Indeed, Sarah’s new two-bedroom apartment was poorly equipped to respond to the complex patterning of suburban densification: fly-screens and ceiling fans were not included in the design, despite the intensity of heat and insects. These failures reflect the search for unified, consumable models of high-rise housing within fossil-fuel based capitalism (Jacobs, 2006; McNeill, 2009; Steele and Wiesel, 2014; Wakefield-Rann, 2021), and industry resistance to stronger environmental and ecological performance standards (Moore et al., 2019; Oldfield, 2022). The resultant disjuncture between building materialities and place is further captured in Sarah’s comparison between her apartment in Liverpool, and her experience of living in Far North Queensland. Despite the similarity of the summer temperatures in both locations, Sarah was perplexed that ceiling fans were not standard in Liverpool:

One thing I wish we had was ceiling fans. I don’t know why they don’t have them here … I’m from Far North Queensland and so is my husband and every house has them and it gets just as hot here as it does up there so I kind of wondered why there aren’t ceiling fans.

The problem of separating cool night air from insects that bite or disrupt sleep (or road sounds or bushfire smoke) challenges the evolutionary narrative of high-rise apartments as individualised, autonomous spaces, protected from the discomforts of the external environment (Gissen, 2014). Ayasha’s account of her two-bedroom rental apartment, shared with her husband and two-year-old is indicative. Ayasha undertook all domestic work in her household, and her kitchen (described as her ‘workstation’) was one of her favourite spaces in the apartment. The space was ‘very airy’ with a strong exhaust fan, that contributed to a sense of ease as she did not have to ‘bother about the smell’ of food. The strong fan and ventilation that dispersed cooking smell was, along with the view, what she ‘loved the most’ about her apartment. Yet the lack of external blinds on the bedroom windows overlooking a large, uncovered balcony, meant that Ayasha struggled to heat the bedrooms in winter. Describing her daughter’s bedroom as ‘always wet’ and relying on small electric heaters for warmth, Ayasha’s narrative highlighted the health costs of passive design gaps and the absence of insulating fixtures:

Now it is winter, the big challenge is at night-time it gets really cold because of the fog, like the interior glass gets wet and the room is always wet even when the heater is on. You’ve got to keep the heater on 24/7 for a long night, you’ve got to keep the whole night on because it will get dry and both of my daughter and me are having this cough thing because of the continuous heater, using of heating. So, like at some point of time we have to put the heater off and then it gets more cold inside the room. So, she’s not even recovering well this time, every time for this reason she is getting, for last three weeks continuously she has this runny nose like teary eyes and cough. She’s not recovering at all.

Ayasha’s account points to a trend across the interviews, that airy infrastructures are fragmented both within, and across individual apartments. This included newer apartments like Naomi’s, characterised by well-ventilated and open-plan living areas, yet poorly insulated bedrooms and bathrooms. As Naomi recalled:

The front end of our apartment is fine, like this living space, because we’d get quite a decent amount of sun that comes through. But the back end does get very cold so we’re conscious of the mould and we’re trying to keep the house aerated but it is very hard. In the bathroom, there’s a vent but it’s not strong and you don’t really want the window open for too long when it’s cold so it does get a real build-up of moisture in the bathrooms. And we also get condensation on our windows. So on the back windows when you’ve got the blinds closed, you’ll wake up and you can see a layer of wet all up the windows and on the ledge and it’s really hard to dry everything out.

These accounts not only echo the failure of thermal performance standards in Australia (Moore et al., 2019; Oldfield, 2022) but point to the need for a diversity of airy infrastructures that could better mediate insects, noise and pollutants, while viscerally mediating human encounters with fluctuating temperatures. This includes the deployment of passive design measures centring insulation, outdoor ventilation, air filtration, flexible shading, screening and orientation (Uteuova, 2022); and following COVID-19, the circulation of ‘fresh air’ (Wakefield-Rann, 2021). Despite the potential of integrated, adaptable infrastructure to orient high-rise towards the pharmacological quality of air, the apartments of our participants fell short of this potential, with deeply uneven outcomes across thermal, olfactory and pathogenic registers.

Emergent high-rise assemblages: Residents’ vernacular adaptations

It is perhaps unsurprising that critical resilience theorists are drawn to institutional and community experiments of disconnection from global imaginaries in the Anthropocene (Wakefield, 2020). These processes range from capitalocentric plans to abandon sinking cities and recreate autonomous islands (Wakefield, 2022); to more mundane accounts of resourcefulness and everyday climate change adaptation and mitigation (Carr, 2023; de Vet and Head, 2020; Gibson et al., 2013; Wakefield, 2020). Interviewees shared numerous accounts of such resourcefulness that, rather than reinforcing encapsulation, deployed everyday technologies that harnessed the benefits of air and its materialities, unsettling the boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and engaging more effectively with air’s pharmacological qualities.

Naomi’s off-the-plan apartment, like Sarah’s, did not come with fly-screens. Naomi and her husband, who lived in their two-bedroom apartment with four children, therefore initially kept the windows closed to avoid an ‘attack of the mozzies’ and as a result ‘did really feel the heat’. Eventually, they installed fly-screens, and small electrical fans, attached three-at-a-time along bedroom walls. These micro-adaptations enlist apartment walls as cooling infrastructures that in conjunction with open, yet screened windows, achieve air circulation while blocking insects. These low-tech, low-energy vernacular adaptations activate latent potential through the re-arrangement of everyday materials (cf. Easterling, 2021) creating a sense of comfort, sleep and restfulness by better aligning the building to the socio-ecological context of western Sydney summer, making the sweltering apartment, as Naomi put it, ‘okay’. Rather than capitalocentric technologies (Easterling, 2021: 11), fly-screens, blinds and electric fans were commonly used by households to ‘localise’ building infrastructures to function more effectively within their environment. Blinds, self-installed ceiling and wall fans, and fly-screens meant that for Amy, like Naomi, in the ‘challenging’ summer ‘you get by’. Moments of tension, as with those adapting to climate change elsewhere (de Vet and Head, 2020), were therefore generative of innovations and adaptations among households.

Adaptive capacities are not however, universal or inevitable. Marion for instance, had lost her job and returned to university, surviving on student subsidy. Estimating that after rent, internet and electricity she is left with about $60 a fortnight for food and personal expenses, like many older women living alone, she is on the poverty line (Power, 2019). Like Mahgol, Marion manages summer heat by withdrawing from the world, closing her blinds, windows and doors, epitomising what Pelling (2003) calls the ratchet effect – where multiple vulnerabilities intersect rendering adaptation impossible. While Marion’s account highlights the risks of romanticising vernacular and everyday adaptation, the problem of ‘cool and biting air’ is not only the space of low-tech and low-energy solutions. It is fully inhabited by mass manufactured, high-energy technologies such as the air conditioner, that intersect with smart phone automation to lock apartment comfort into greenhouse gas generation and heat islands. Indeed, as with their counterparts in comparative studies (see de Vet and Head, 2020) the air conditioner was ubiquitous among households, defending the ideal of an encapsulated high-rise, even though, as well-established in the literature, access and use were shaped by wealth (Gabriel et al., 2016).

Among participants, low-energy design and infrastructures that help to embed apartments in place are far from standard fixtures in Liverpool’s densifying CBD. In practice, as we have seen, Sarah resolves this lack of differentiation with air conditioning even though she clearly values ceiling fans (‘that would have been handy’). As Gibson et al. (2013: 4) observe, in the absence of appropriate infrastructure, households adopt unsustainable practices for ‘reasons that are purely ethical from their point of view’. The provision of basic infrastructure in such contexts, would therefore not only shift the behaviours of the wealthy, but provide the basics from which to enhance the adaptive capacities of the poor.

Conclusion: Towards an elemental high-rise architecture

Ayasha has taken Sophie-May to the kitchen to look at the view. Reflecting on the first day she saw the apartment, Ayasha declares: ‘this view, you know, melts me down’. The term ‘melts’ captures the transformative effect of the view from her fifth-story apartment denoting a sense of comfort and relaxation associated with the ideal of high-rise as a retreat from the environmental complexities of the world below (Barber, 2020; Gissen, 2014; Otter, 2018). Participant interviews were filled with these desired ‘views’ contrasting the ‘landscape’ and busyness of the town centre with a sense of calm, peacefulness and perspective. Yet participants in our study also reveal a more complex and vulnerable landscape of densification, that is unevenly developed and poorly adapted to the interlinked atmospheric challenges in the Anthropocene.

The first aim of our research was to better understand how the interconnected dilemmas of air in the Anthropocene come to matter in the embodied process of high-rise dwelling. Leveraging the sensorial capacity of bodies to register air’s diverse substantiations (Engelmann, 2015) our research locates social and environmental change in the everyday context of high-rise dwelling. Our research showed for instance, that the sound of Western Sydney’s suburban freeways and main roads produces high-rise landscapes of disquiet and sleeplessness, while temperature extremes in the cooler months silently envelop apartments in water (and mould) extending poor health and respiratory illness. In the summer, apartments filled with insects (e.g. mosquitos), linking permeable high-rise to nocturnal feeding habitats, disrupted sleep and parenting norms. The porosity of residential homes not only reveals the fallacy of universal encapsulation – shaped by both wealth and minimal performance standards – but the oppositional qualities of air as simultaneously desirable and undesirable. At the same time, while concerns for greenhouse gases (GHGs) within architectural and planning discourse challenge the ideological genesis of high-rise as a globally replicable thermal space (Barber, 2020), these same critiques simplify the diverse substantiations and pharmacological qualities of air. These qualities enrol sound, temperature, particulate matter and insects simultaneously, underscoring the contemporary relevance of architectural paradigms that centre flexible screening, shading and ventilation.

Assessing the capacities of high-rise housing in Liverpool to engage with these intersecting challenges is critical to the success of suburban densification, and was the second aim of our research. Far from the ideological genesis of high-rise as ‘discreet capsules’ protected from exterior sensory inputs and distortions (Otter, 2018) embodied encounters with air reveal impoverished building materialities denuded of fly-screens, ceiling fans, effective insulation, solar orientation and external blinds and coverings. With routine gaps in the heterogenous web of building infrastructures and fixtures, Liverpool CBD invites infection, as well as heat, insects and sound, that even before COVID-19, pointed to public policy and construction limitations and shortfalls. The failure of housing systems to engage with airy infrastructures immerses residents in affective atmospheres of immobilisation and disorientation, the uncertainties of energy industry restructuring and transformation, car-dependent suburbs and climate extremes. At the same time, the potential for diverse thermal practices to take hold in Liverpool are readily stifled by the air conditioner, facilitating dis-cultivation of lower-energy alternatives, diverse comfort levels and experimentation (cf. Farbotko and Waitt, 2011). These accounts reflect wider assessments that wealthier residents may opt for high-consumption housing models over low-cost, low-energy innovations, a tendency that encapsulated high-rise can encourage (Rinkinen et al., 2021).

Within this context, our third aim was to assess the potential of emergent high-rise practices and verticalities. Here, our data showed that some participants made low-cost and low-energy adjustments, ‘dialling up’ eco-infrastructural networks that screen, insulate and ventilate, attuning high-rise to the pharmacological quality of air and ‘dialling down’ technologies of encapsulation (cf. Easterling, 2014). Highlighting the emergent capacities and latent potentials of everyday technologies applied in unlikely ways, vernacular adaptation echoes the philosophy of medium design (Easterling, 2021) and emergent capacities of assemblage through which alternative housing systems unfold (Cook, 2018). This is not an uncritical retreat to a ‘bounded’ scale of the intimate or everyday, but the evolution of a low-tech, low-cost architectural paradigm that applies existing technologies to enhance the capacities of suburban high-rise to screen, cool and ventilate. In so doing, Liverpool high-rise residents’ vernacular adaptations owe more to the building systems of the early 20th-century (Barber, 2020) than the denuded high-rise of fossil-fuel based capitalism. In so doing, resident’s vernacular adaptations find critical resonance with an emerging paradigm of high-rise interventions for healthy and resilient suburban densification at larger scales.

High-rise apartments such as The Commons and Nightingale developed by Breathe Architecture in Melbourne for example, are experimenting with low-energy cooling, ventilation and shading underpinned by alternative financing and price-caps (Moore and Doyon, 2018). Apartments by RiseBoro, in New York City similarly foreground passive-design buildings, enabled through affordable financing models (Uteuova, 2022). These models move beyond the encapsulated high-rise of global capitalism, to centre practices of commoning, increasingly seen as the basis of resilient housing models (Crabtree, 2017; Mellick-Lopes et al., 2018, 2020). Earlier experiments like Athens’polikatoikias (tiered, multi-unit housing) pre-date contemporary eco-infrastructural crises, yet offer valuable legacies: wrap-around, covered balconies, communal heating, work–living spaces, and spacious common areas in high-density formats that screen and shade, rather than ‘block’ air and its diverse materialities (Barber, 2020; O’Sullivan, 2020).

By bringing an elemental approach into dialogue with assemblage in geography, high-rise models that exceed fossil-fuel based capitalism are brought into focus. Paying attention to the diverse ways that air is sensed and registered by participants, as well as the broader social and ecological contexts that via air, become sedimented in these encounters, we reveal high-rise as a socio-ecological assemblage linking diverse geographies of car-dependent suburbanisation, pollution and climate-change induced temperature extremes to high-rise dwelling in the Anthropocene. Bringing assemblage thinking into dialogue with elemental geographies thus shifts the focus away from the situated ways in which the global proliferation of high-rise has been (unevenly) sustained (e.g. Jacobs, 2006), towards the ways that global environmental change comes to matter in the place-based and situated context of high-rise dwelling. In recognising the affinities and co-constitution of cities, environments and bodies, our paper contributes to a reimagining of the urban through the elemental, exploring scholarly and policy concerns beyond the debts that high-rise housing owes to nature, to foreground the capacities of housing to house in the context of environmental and infrastructural upheaval.