PRESENTER: Scott O’Bryan (EALC and History, IU Bloomington)
TOPIC: Mapping the Thermal City: Built Landscapes, Urban Climatology, and a History of Heat in Tokyo
DATE: Friday, February 10, 2012
DATE: Friday, February 10, 2012
TIME: 12:00-1:15 p.m.
LOCATION: Ballantine 004
LOCATION: Ballantine 004
(Light refreshments will be served. You are also welcome to bring your own lunch.)
As one of the world’s largest cities, Tokyo during the post-World War II decades was repeatedly an early harbinger of many of the environmental problems now associated on even larger scales with such megalopolises around the globe as Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Chongqing, and Mumbai. As a participant at the U.N. population conference in Tokyo of 1972 declared, one could at the time witness in Japan in a concentrated fashion, and by extension Tokyo as its largest metropolitan area, all of the population and urban environmental dilemmas of the age. By the very end of the twentieth century, an emerging field of urban climate studies was even revealing that, beyond the frightening global climate effects of our reliance on fossil fuels, such very large cities as Tokyo are themselves dramatically reshaping the climatic environments in which they stand.
Examining the contemporary history of Tokyo as one of the premier examples in the world of what is called the urban heat island effect--and of scientific and official attempts to understand and represent this climatic phenomenon--this talk seeks to examine the ways in which the presence of our built environments reveals the very “built” nature of the climate itself: Climate experts, officials and citizens alike have been scrambling over the last two decades to demonstrate the ways in which urban planning, development, changing lifestyles, and architectural decisions have conspired in Tokyo to increase the average temperature of the city by three degrees Celsius over the last century and thus to change even what seem the most apparently natural elements of the city’s climatic environment, the winds and rain. Through the rise of a new field of urban climatology, city and national officials, architectural visionaries, and citizens have begun to remap the city as thermal landscape and to wrestle with the built environmental legacies of earlier concepts of Tokyo as “world city.” For many, the key to combating the heat island effect lies in restoring older wind and rain patterns in the metropolis, in part by rediscovering the former life of Tokyo as a water city—one with long historical and environmental linkages to the life of its canals, rivers, and ocean harbor.
Scott O'Bryan is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and he serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the EALC Department. He is the author of The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press and Columbia Weatherhead East Asian Institute), which examines the rise of growthist modes of social scientific thought and political practice. His current research and teaching relate to environmental history and its intersections with the history of cities. This paper is drawn from his current book project on urban climate change and the history of Tokyo.
Persons with disabilities interested in attending our events who may require assistance, please contact us in advance at (812) 855-3765.
East Asian Studies Center
Indiana University
1021 East Third Street
Memorial Hall West 207
Bloomington, IN 47405
Phone: (812) 855-3765
Fax: (812) 855-7762
E-mail: easc@indiana.edu
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