The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG) sponsors an annual lecture at a major international geography or geoscience conference. Presented by leading scholars of tropical geographies, the lectures are also published in the journal. Since 1953 the SJTG (and antecedents) has been a leading international forum for scholarship on tropical environments, localities and their connections. The SJTG publishes theoretical and empirical articles and reviews that deal with the physical and human environments of the tropics and development issues from geographical as well as interrelated disciplinary viewpoints.
This year’s lecture will be delivered by Rohinton Emmanuel who is a Professor in Sustainable Design and Construction at Glasgow Caledonian University. An architect with urban design interests, Rohinton has pioneered the inquiry of urban heat in tropical cities and has taught and consulted on climate, energy and environment - sensitive design, building and urban sustainability and its assessment, urban heat islands and energy efficiency.
A climate-sensitive tropical urbanism under extreme heat
Rohinton Emmanuel
Professor in Sustainable Design and Construc9on
Director of The BEAM Research Centre
Department of Civil Engineering and Environmental Management
Glasgow Caledonia University
Abstract
Tropical urban dwellers face twin climate challenges that impinge on their quality of life – climate overheating and the urban heat island. The latter super-imposed on the former to lead to disastrous thermal comfort, carbon and energy consequences. Solutions are urgently needed to ‘climatizing the commons’ as opposed to the current approach of cooling one building at a time. Traditional urbanity in the tropics is about the ‘maidan’ – i.e. the commons and its appropriate spatio-temporal use. This was further augmented by a design ethos which emphasised the ‘linking of in and out.’ In the tropics, traditional building skin was very porous, to a point of near non-existent. Contemporary design is not only energy intensive, but it also ‘hardened’ the membrane to a point of severing this in-out link.
How do we ‘climatize the commons’ in the tropics? Tradition alone may not hold answers for the climate itself has significantly warmed and the UHI has been super-imposed on an already ‘problem climate.’ In this talk, I will argue for a four-pronged approach:
• Urban design – urban approaches centred on shading and ventilation
• Urban planning – promotion of a street-centred quality-of-life approach to land use and activity planning
• Urban politics – heat disaster risk resilience planning
• Urban culture – approaches to ‘coolth’ as a wellbeing issue (as opposed to mere thermal comfort, which is what air conditioners promise to achieve)
I will conclude by exploring the research needs in each of the above areas to lead to a climatesensitive
tropical urbanism.
Speaker
- Rohinton Emmanuel, Glasgow Caledonian University, United Kingdom
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