Ungrounding the Urban Region through Affects and Effects of Air Pollution

Keywords: air pollution; urban region; urban political ecology; affect; Tel Aviv
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 4/11/2021 09:35 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/11/2021 10:50 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

Urban regions are primarily seen as territorial agglomerations, grounded in land, while their aerial dimensions often remain invisible, even when they are a matter of health and death. Although the dangerous outcomes of air pollution (AP) in cities are recognized worldwide, critical studies tracing the urban region’s geography of social and environmental inequalities through the medium of air and its pollution remain rare. Critical studies focusing on AP as a distinctly urban phenomenon, often from an environmental justice perspective, are incommensurate with mainstream policies and technological fixes, which regard urban air-space as stable and homogeneous and disregard its volatile inequities. In order to trace the social and political exclusions and inclusions that AP engenders in urban space, this paper critically engages with two main approaches and the differences between them: the first sees AP as a set of measurable socio-material effects, while the second is attentive to AP as engendering diverse affective experiences. Using in-depth interviews and content analysis, the study analyzes three scenes from the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Region, which represent AP controversies that have garnered recent attention – ranging from Tel Aviv’s central bus station as “ground zero” of transportation-induced AP to agricultural waste-burning in the peri-urban edges. The paper concludes that the effect/affect divide entails critical inclusions and exclusions at different urban scales, from the neighborhood to the metropolitan region, with consequences for diverse struggles over “the right to city air”. It thus highlights the analytical and political potentialities of ungrounding the urban region through its air.