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Air Conditioning the Arabian Peninsula

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

Gökçe Günel
Gökçe Günel*
Affiliation:
School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.; e-mail: ggunel@email.arizona.edu
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Extract

With much of the Arabian Peninsula characterized by hot and arid weather conditions during long summer seasons, residents are forced to rely on air conditioning to cool their surroundings. Before the construction of air conditioning infrastructures, many would leave the coast during the summer months to head to oases, such as Al Ain near Abu Dhabi, or live in tents in the desert to find relief from the heat. From the 1950s, European and American building practices shaped the region with little consideration of vernacular design elements or energy conservation. These building practices introduced air conditioning as a cooling method. For instance, the 1951 Report of Operations to the Saudi Arab Government by the Arabian American Oil Company explained how “automobiles, air conditioning units, sewing machines, washing machines, refrigerators, and many other modern conveniences are now readily available” in Al Hasa, a significant region for Aramco's operations on the east of Saudi Arabia. By 1952, workers residing in Aramco's camps could have air conditioning units installed in their rooms on a rental basis. Air conditioning technology reconfigured urban environments, altering the relationship between indoors and outdoors, and ultimately constituting what Jiat-Hwee Chang and Tim Winter term a “thermal modernity” that transforms how built forms are imagined and inhabited. The current widespread use of air conditioning in the region is therefore connected not only to high temperatures, but also to how air conditioning is singled out as the ultimate technical fix in confronting the climate. Other solutions to managing heat, such as improving insulation mechanisms for residences and office buildings, have been less pervasive.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 50 , Special Issue 3: Environment and Society in the Middle East and North Africa , August 2018 , pp. 573 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

1 Arabian American Oil Company, Report of Operations to the Saudi Arab Government (Dharan, Saudi Arabia: The Company, 1951), 34.

2 Arabian American Oil Company, Report of Operations to the Saudi Arab Government (Dharan, Saudi Arabia: The Company, 1952), 46–48.

3 Chang, Jiat-Hwee and Winter, Tim, “Thermal Modernity and Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture 20 (2015): 92–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another poignant example of how air conditioning changes cities, see Thompson, Robert S., “‘The Air-Conditioning Capital of the World’: Houston and Climate Control,” in Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast, ed. Melosi, Martin and Pratt, Joseph (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 88–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Baird, Ian G. and Quastel, Noah, “Rescaling and Reordering Nature–Society Relations: The Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Dam and Laos–Thailand Electricity Networks,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105 (2015): 1221–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Rob Kemp, “Keeping Cool in UAE Can Have Health Costs,” The National, 4 July 2011, accessed 5 March 2017, http://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/well-being/keeping-cool-in-uae-can-have-health-costs.

5 Alex Davda, “Workplace Doctor: How to Survive in an Igloo-Like Office,” The National, 2 June 2015, accessed 15 March 2018, https://www.thenational.ae/business/workplace-doctor-how-to-survive-in-an-igloo-like-office-1.96908.

6 For more on this topic, see Günel, Gökçe, “Masdar City's Hidden Brain: When Monitoring and Modification Collide,” The ARPA Journal 1 (2014), http://www.arpajournal.net/masdar-citys-hidden-brain/; and Günel, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

7 Bryan Walsh, “Masdar City: The World's Greenest City?,” Time, 25 January 2011, accessed 16 March 2016, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2043934,00.html#ixzz1pGg0Z1Dg.

8 John Vidal, “Masdar City – A Glimpse of the Future in the Desert,” The Guardian, 26 April 2011, accessed 14 March 2016, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/26/masdar-city-desert-future.

9 Murphy, Michelle, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For an analysis of thermoception as a sense that generates pleasure and discomfort, especially when humans occupy thermally diverse environments, confronting different levels of warmth and cool, see Heschong, Lisa, Thermal Delight in Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

11 For an exploration of a return to vernacular cooling mechanisms, see Winter, Tim, “Urban Sustainability in the Arabian Gulf: Air Conditioning and Its Alternatives,” Urban Studies 53 (2003): 3264–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on wind towers, see Hawker, Ronald, Hull, Daniel, and Rouhani, Omid, “Wind-Towers and Pearl Fishing: Architectural Signals in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Arabian Gulf,” Antiquity 79 (2003): 625–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.