The conditioning of comfort

This commentary considers how the insights from the Building Research & Information 2008 special issue on 'Comfort in a Lower Carbon Society' impact upon our understanding of the nature of comfort demand; their importance and relevance to the theory and policies of building comfort; and the commentary draws upon changing comfort practices in other parts of the world. One of the most important contributions of the collection is to situate comfort historically and technically, but also to give attention to the social consequences of air-conditioning. Air-conditioning has brought with it an encapsulation of home within house and has led to significant changes in the social geography of home and neighbourhood. The social, material and discursive facets of air-conditioning are globalizing at a rapid pace, fostered by the spread of inappropriate building practices, faith in modern scientific solutions to achieving comfort, and new ideas about the human body. Local knowledge about climate and comfort is waning in many parts of the world, and cooling comfort increasingly relegated to technical experts. This collection makes an important contribution to understanding how air-conditioning has become pervasive and suggests new lines of thinking in the crucial effort to move towards a less carbon-intensive comfort regime.