But from the socio-political standpoint, air conditioning, frequently delivered as the result of an appliance, a device barely worthy of consideration as technology, whose experts are considered workers, not techies may have had as profound an impact as any.
The reason is that air conditioning has permitted, even encouraged mobility in ways that the smartphone has only enhanced. Entire populations have moved geographically because they can now dwell in comfort in regions formerly considered too inhospitable for active life. It has changed diets and health (for better and worse), thanks to refrigeration; changed architecture so that capturing breezes, warding off heat or humidity and family living is no longer a prime consideration; and it has driven cultural changes that threaten the philosophical as well as existential tenets of many a faith previously rooted in mankind's subservience to the laws of nature.
Politically, the reinvention of regions like America's south and the spread of its conservative values is due in part to the in migration of others whose voting power has risen, just as the ability of those dwelling in places as disparate as the Middle East and South America has changed the outlook and the nature of the opportunities available to those who live there. In the longer term, air conditioning, directly through the impact on greenhouse gases and indirectly through the movement of populations, has had an effect on the environment. In short, just as the computer and the internet have impacted how humanity interacts with the world, air conditioning has affected where and why it does so. JL
Henry Grabar reports in Salon:
To be air-conditioned, in many countries, is to be modern. The advent of cooling is often incompatible with traditional architecture. More important, the effect that air-conditioned innovations like malls are already having on social life and cultural practices.
A friend of mine, visiting Brooklyn, drove down to Coney Island on a recent summer weekend. He remarked with some surprise that kids in Kings County still played in the spray of fire hydrants, “like they do in the oldphotos .” It’s true: Crossing the borough on the muggiest days of summer vacation, it’s not unusual to see a popped valve spurt cool water across the asphalt, transforming a street into a jury-rigged Splish Splash for neighborhood kids.
Yet such impromptu playgrounds seem to belong firmly to another era. Mid-century Greenwich Village, immortalized by Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” teemed with children every afternoon. “This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys,” she wrote in 1961. “They slop in puddles, write with chalk, jump rope, roller skate, shoot marbles, trot out their possessions, converse, trade cards,play stoop ball, walk stilts, decorate soap-box scooters, dismember old baby carriages, climb onrailings , run up and down.”
As Alex Marshall, a fellow at the Regional Plan Association in New York, noted in a recent Daily News piece, that description far surpasses anything you can find on Hudson Street today, or most other places in America. Our culture has changed. Childhood is now zealously supervised; in July, a South Carolina woman was arrested for letting her 9-year-old play in a park while she was at work.
The environment has changed too: Summer in the city isn’t as hot as it used to be, thanks to air conditioning. When Jane Jacobs described the “sidewalk ballet,” fewer than 14 percent of households in urban America had air conditioning. Today, it’s over 87 percent.
It’s almost impossible to imagine, dashing from the house A/C to the car A/C to the office A/C to the restaurant A/C, how hot and different the American summer once was.
One evocative recollection of the un-air-conditioned American city is Arthur Miller’s vignette “Before Air-Conditioning,” which describes New York in the summer of 1927. The street in those days was repurposed nightly as an outdoor dormitory; mattress-laden fire escapes lined the block like ironbunk beds .
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