Aeropolis - Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds

Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds provides a new framework to think about air and air pollution by viewing it as a city with social, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements. It proposes a methodology of "designing-thinking-making" to connect our understanding of air with ongoing struggles for just futures, focusing on the diversity of air and its relation to humans, non-humans, and environments.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 25 July 2023
Publisher: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds provides a speculative and interdisciplinary framework to reorient our common understandings of air and air pollution as matter "out there." Aeropolis challenges the regimes of managing air that ultimately uphold dominant modes of world-making that rely on forms of exclusion and inequity. Instead, Aeropolis proposes that air should be thought of as a city, to center its social, cultural, political, ecological entanglements. Drawing upon feminist technoscience and queer ecological frameworks, Aeropolis moves away from solutions toward a methodology of "designing-thinking-making" that redirects and connects our understandings of air—as designers, as citizens—with ongoing struggles for just futures.

Aeropolis unfolds through a series of design interventions, histories of air, and theoretical coordinates, thinking with air across its many forms—through smog and dust, bodies and breath, pollen and weeds, and from urban design to geopolitics, polluted environments to open data, parks to aerial infrastructures. It insists that we acknowledge the diversity of air and its relation to humans, non-humans, and environments, both physically and affectively. That we become sensible to air by following its unruliness—by living, breathing, seeing, holding, touching, queering airs.

Contributions from María Puig de la Bellacasa and Timothy K. Choy enrich Aeropolis's insights.

Weight: 332g
Dimension: 135 x 204 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781941332788