Air/Atmospheres of the Megacity

Haze

As the bridge snakes over sunken piers just above the waters of Lagos Lagoon, it passes a floating slum: thousands of wooden houses, perched on stilts a few feet above their own bobbing refuse, with rust-colored iron roofs wreathed in the haze from thousands of cooking fires. Fishermen and market women paddle dugout canoes on water as black and viscous as an oil slick. The bridge then passes the sawmill district, where rain-forest logs – sent across from the far shore, thirty miles to the east – form a floating mass by the piers. Smouldering hills of sawdust landfill send white smoke across the bridge, which mixes with diesel exhaust from the traffic. Beyond the sawmills, the old waterfront markets, the fishermen’s shanties, the blackened façades of high-rise housing projects, and the half-abandoned skyscrapers of downtown Lagos Island loom under a low, dirty sky. (Packer, 2006)

George Packer’s travelogue in Lagos has become typical of accounts that describe the character of a distinctive kind of urban climatic. The wreathing haze and dirty sky constitute the environmental and atmospheric conditions of megacity life. For Mike Davis (2006), the smog hanging over the slum-cities of the South are as a Dantesque ecology from the past, ‘shrouding’ the buildings on the ground below in a blanket of blue-grey. Claude Monet might have called this quality the l’envelope or ‘atmosphere’ in his studies of 19th-century London. In the megacity these atmospheres are produced from the noxious pollutants of rapid and unplanned industrial and residential development, inequitable waste management policies, or no such policies at all. Above all it is growth which sees the effective suspension of raw materials and combusted chemical combinations poured into plumes and clouds of pollutants hanging above the world’s megacities.

But perhaps these evocative descriptions have become so normal because, for Monet, the air is what gives life to representations, what animates them, what makes them real to a reader. Atmosphere fills the void of media abstractions with the air of a place we can imagine inhabiting. We could go as far as to say that it is the air which has smothered such places with a kind of charisma. Smouldering away, the megacity’s atmospheres lend a definite aura. Antennae of hope, perhaps, their hues radiate spectacle, theatre, fear or worse.

Why pursue the atmosphere in the contexts of the megacity? This is partly a response to three sorts of perspectives, first a series of recent writings which have begun to excavate the vertical and volumetric proportions of territories and cities. Such approaches challenge the nascent horizontality of urban forms with a perspective of three-dimensional volumetric spatial formations, although I would suggest that they are yet to be examined outside of the militarized architectures and technics of bunkers, infrastructure and formal building types so far explored (Weizman, 2004; Graham and Hewitt, 2013; Elden, 2013). Or, a far more developed field, the hydropolitical examinations of water, sanitation and (in)formal infrastructures (for example see Gandy, 2005, 2006; McFarlane, 2008a, 2008b; Loftus, 2009). The other is the way the megacity tends to have been lent a certain kind of atmospheric charisma in the dust, din and dirt, the dark and gloomy oppressive settings or kaleidoscopic colours, dances of light that make megacities the most effervescent of urban forms. Third, the urban ‘climate’ has rarely received the kind of aerial analysis which Peter Sloterdijk (2009) has called ‘making explicit’ beyond an urban climatological and meteorological account of air (although see Choy, 2010; Graham and Hewitt, 2013).

Uniting these three areas of interest and specialism, this paper asks how should we attend to the relationship between these remarkably sprawling, dynamic and unequal urban forms and the air – an atmosphere – that might increasingly be considered as an essential part of those forms, as if a snail’s shell. What’s more, this air is more than just air but constitutive of the material affective relations that animate the experience of the city in a way which we might say is atmospheric. In this paper I seek to initiate a research agenda on urban airs that comprehends, as argued so fluently by McCormack, their atmospheres as simultaneously meteorological and affective (McCormack, 2008; Brennan, 2004), an agenda which comprehends megacity air/atmospheres in their vitality, corporeality and expressiveness.

This paper attunes to the close and expressive substances that make up immersion in a material-affective ecology of a place, with the qualities of the city that seem to imbue its material and biological fabric with affect. There is a growing body of work and literature to aid us that considers the ‘affective qualities that emanate from but exceed the assembling of bodies’ (Anderson, 2009: 80). Notions of atmosphere draw from traditions in continental aesthetic theory, French urban sociology and architecture (Tixier et al., 2011), and an emergent cultural geographic field of atmospheric enquiry (Jackson and Fannin, 2011; Edensor, 2012; see also Adey et al., forthcoming). The air or atmosphere in these accounts is somehow ambient and apart but also encasing. An atmosphere is relatively unstable, inwardly and externally ‘radiating’, yet it is still an ‘envelope’ that may ‘“press” upon one body or collective’ even as it comes into being and remains unstable, and never quite there or graspable (Anderson, 2009: 77). Atmospheres carry us away in their buoyancy and lightness, or, conversely, they may sink us, drowning us with heaviness, lethargy or exhaustion.

The paper develops such an approach to megacity air in three main ways. First, the megacity air will be explored through its possession of a contradiction: between growth and decline, desire and repulsion, air tells us about difference, because today’s testimony of pollutants and choking air are far closer than they are far away from those that have delighted in the inhalation of perfumes, spices and fragrances, redolent of 18th- and 19th-century colonial travel writing. An analysis of air reveals who belongs and who does not, who is deserving and who is not in a constellation of megacity inequality. These extreme airs are perhaps what puts the megacity apart from other urban and political forms.

Second, closely related to the issues that circulate within a geopolitics of verticality and the technocratic security concerns of volumetric conceptions of territory are air/atmospheres that constitute an environmental ecology of security threats and crisis that thwart megacity life and justify environmental and urban policies as ‘security’ (see Zeiderman, 2013). We are well familiar with the events of the night of 1984 when one of the worst industrial accidents in history killed some 3000 (according to minimum estimates) people and caused over half a million injuries in the densely populated city of Bhopal, capital of the Madhya Pradesh region in India (Bogard, 1993). Disasters such as the Bhopal incident – and litigation and legal claims are famously still outstanding from the event – present us with the scale of the megacities’ atmospheric problems that inspired a generation of researchers to explore the technological disasters of urban chemical pollution. ¹ It is just that today’s atmospheric emergencies are happening with perhaps much wider scope and imprecision than before.

Third, despite Luce Irigaray’s implicit sense that the air is a sharing, the paper will show how a recognition of difference by atmosphere is frequently reproduced in megacity building and construction projects that seek to secure the air from everyone else. The atmosphere is made safe by lassoing and projecting out into the air, encapsulating it (Connor, 2004). Such projects frequently involve the production of secessionary atmospheres, the production of distinctive urban natures and climates (see also Gissen, 2009) through practices of removal and exclusion which are not entirely separate from other atmospheric security concerns.

And yet, we are not walking eudiometers (see Schaffer, 1990) of air’s qualities or virtues, or are we? How might an approach towards air and atmospheres, in Kathleen Stewart’s (2011; see also McCormack, 2008) terms, require a particular sensitivity to bring air/atmospheres to the sensible or to grasp the insensible by attuning to atmospheres, by homing into the background hum? How to elicit and incite the ‘forms of writing and critique that detour into descriptive eddies and attach to trajectories … writing and theorizing that tries to stick with something becoming atmospheric’ (Stewart, 2011: 452)? The way I want to explore these three core themes is to follow Stewart’s attempts to stick – through writing – to the air/atmospheres of the megacity. I focus in particular on the air portrayed in Katherine Boo’s (2012) Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a celebrated tale of life in the Mumbai Annawadi slum positioned in such intimacy to the international airport that it has become bio-ecologically and economically attached to it. And it is in that image, that proximity and juxtaposition between and through Boo’s eyes of Annawadi, those that live there, and the international airport, that we might begin.

Different Air

Air … from Johannesburg to Tehran, to Delhi to Jakarta, isn’t about aesthetics, or even possible climate change at some point in the future: it’s about life and death now. (Doyle and Risely, 2008: 246)

Behind the Beautiful Forevers reflects an uneasy tension reported from megacities, particularly Mumbai. Its atmospheres are demonic, dirty or bedazzlingly exciting and equally immersive. Of course, Said (1978) was critical of precisely these portrayals of the ‘atmospheres’ and the ‘aura’ of the Orient, universally understood within the tropes of fragrance and exoticism as perfumes to be inhaled by a western observer. It is precisely the cardamom and cumin soaked narratives of journalists, writers and novelists that Boo’s account takes to task. But the default alternative to such a position seems a vantage point sustained in writers like Dipesh Chakrabarty, who has described the dominant narratives of Mumbai or Delhi, understood through the grids of European intelligibility, as places of ‘heat and dust’ (Chakrabarty, 2002). Likewise, in Naipaul (1990) ‘fumes and heat and din’ dominate 19th-century writings with an aesthetic cityscape of fever, stagnation and disgusting air. The megacity’s marketplaces and bazaars, so well captured in de Guerville’s visit to Egypt, perfectly illustrate a frantic to and fro between the air’s seductive affectivities (Gregory, 1999) and their capacity to nauseate and sicken.

Contrast with the air/atmospheres of the megacity today and these descriptions have been maintained in the excessive conditionings of touch, sound and smell that apparently still bewilder the western visitor as a sense of intensified presence. Through the megacity’s ‘desiring’ quality, its visitors are brought to a climatic-climax of heat, smell, and the sticky humidity born from fear or lust. The megacity’s charisma is effused and diffused through atmospheres that immerse its dwellers within what Hansen and Verkaaik describe as the ‘soul’ or ‘mythology that is emitted from its buildings, infrastructure, the historicity of its sites and its anonymous crowds’ (2009: 6). A city like Cairo sustains part of de Guerville’s fear with some of the most polluted air on the planet, causing an estimated 15,000 deaths per year. Mumbai’s air has been compared to smoking 20 cigarettes per day, according to a Lonely Planet guide.

Perhaps it is self-evident why these airs matter, because as Timothy Choy (2010) writes so fluently in his constellation of air’s characteristics, the atmosphere tells a story of difference, an awareness of being someplace else, unfamiliar and impossibly strange. Indeed, the concern for Choy writing from the context of Hong Kong is that worries over ‘bad air’ often seem to represent a position of exteriority, of well-educated travel writers, wealthy British expatriates and emergent middle classes. And so we are led by the concern that the constant expression of megacity air is really about the prosaic and aesthetic grudges of a wealthy populace seeking removal from the poor.

Later we will see how the treatment of air deploys especially pernicious urban policies. However, in order to suggest that air/atmospheres matter in this way, we must first recognize that megacity air is not only perceived differently but really is different. Of course the study of urban climates has a particular story. Luke Howard, the inventor of the modern classification of clouds, was one of the first British meteorologists to explore the distinctive climates that would immerse and agitate London’s 19th-century inhabitants. This is a story without the room to be explained with converging disciplinary concerns, from that of meteorological science to climatology and urban sociology (see Jankovic and Hebbert, 2012), but the emergent contribution was to set the basis for an urban climatology which found that dense urban areas are distinctively warmer than their surrounding climates and environs. The idiosyncrasies of mega-urban environments have meant that the combinations of urban surfaces are able to trap heat and stop it from escaping, so impeding the natural ventilation of a surface. Industrial exhausts combine with the absence of vegetation, high residential density and the impermeability of irregular and very narrow streets. The air, flooded with particulates of up to and above 2.5 micrometers – that means millions of tonnes of carbon in the air (Beijing’s is more than Portugal’s entire output) – effectively moves the weight of the city upwards into the air to form a blurred zone of smog and haze that fades ground and building into a smudge which paints the city’s surface with dirt and grime. In these cities of a ‘thousand mouths’, what Howard (1818) would compare to a volcano’s eruptions of matter sent skywards, Beijing’s frequently ‘beyond index’ pollution levels mean this volume sometimes reaches up to 2000 tonnes at any one moment. That is an enormous amount of material suspended in the air, just more widely dispersed than we are used to on the ground.

Urban climatology would not emerge so formally as a discipline until the latter half of the 20th century as a response to the accelerated urbanization of North American cities and global south mega-urban conglomerations such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Landsberg, 1981). Furthermore, accounts of urban air remain rooted within the meteorological study of air quality indicators and particulate matter, and say less about the atmospheres emanating from, expressing and intervening with the individuals and collectives that live in megacities.

How to attend to what Stewart calls the ‘atmospheric fill’? Howard would make a start in the peculiar comparison of the city to a beehive, and by describing the small but important role of the mass accumulation of bodies.

Whoever has passed his hand over the surface of a glass hive, whether in summer or winter, will have perceived, perhaps with surprise, how much the little bodies of the collected multitude of Bees are capable of heating the place that contains them: hence, in warm weather, we see them ventilating the hive with their wings, and occasionally preferring, while unemployed, to lodge, like our citizens, about the entrance. (Howard, 1833: 9–10)

Boo’s approach is to attend to the gaps of the atmospheric infill, the pockets of life in between the ‘elegant modernities’ of Mumbai international airport and its ecologies upon which the Annawadi slum-life depends economically. Boo follows the thresholds between slum and airport, under and over-city – the airport road and the rapidly accelerating development of the site understood as ‘a smogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle course’ from which not only exploitation but ‘wads of possibility had tumbled down to the slums’ (2011). These are atmospheres lived and embodied, an ecology in metabolic exchange with the children, like Abdul, rooting through the garbage spewed out by the airport which turns his snot black. The smell of a leg burning. His informal economy a sentence weighing in on him. On other days, ‘it felt like hope’. Annawadi in Boo’s text is a fragile, delicate chemistry subject to enviro-economic shifts, apparently incommensurate but somehow compatible with global financial changes, terror attacks and shifting government policies enacted by corrupt but desperate local officials. It has to be said that it is remarkably stable, pockets of even atmospherics remaining in habits and routines. Abdul awakens to a familiar whining, parrots nesting and morning flights leaving and taking off, children in school uniform, a goat’s eyes heavy from sleep. Moments of the intimate. Aware of the way he appears to the airport’s clientele, Sunil, a garbage scavenger, adopts a gait of defensive confidence. His ‘rangy, loose-hipped stride’ is for walking down Airport Road as if on his way to school, ‘taking his time, eating air’.

A Crisis of Air

Air is constantly used to tell us about our urban futures as well as a reminder of our past. The uncertainty of these troubling airs means that they are often located, put on a trajectory, and used to indicate a horizon of crisis. Journalist and environmental surveys on megacities such as Dhaka seem to delight in the emphasis on a distinctive air teleologically routed as an atmosphere of living within a linear cycle of world development. The ‘bluish haze’ which ‘rises in the murky air’ is attributed to high levels of domestic fires in the shantytowns ‘kindled with paper, scavenged lumber and bits of plastic junk’ (German and Pyne, 2010). These seem not to signal a ‘return to a prior age’, although with Lagos the case is of a worsening ‘involution’ of vast expansion combined with economic decline (Gandy, 2005). Rather, they usher in ‘the dawn of something new’, a process of development that Mike Davis has likened to another industrial revolution.

The effective timing of this developmental discourse locates the megacity within a returning linear narrative which moves from the smog-ridden air of 19th-century London – often rehearsed as a backdrop to the megacities of today – towards a re-turning paradigm of a different kind of future which sees the First World as no longer a suitable trajectory ‘of becoming’ (Ferguson, 2006). This ‘unique mixture of sunlight, atmosphere and pollution’, the ‘compelling inspiration’ for Turner, Whistler, Monet and others (2006), today are representations which appear locked into narratives of where the West has gone – from Dickensian narratives of choking alleyways and street life and smog disasters in the 1950s to a point which will see western cities begin to move backward in the direction of Lima and Lagos rather ‘than “forward” towards Paris and New York’, writes Zeiderman (2008). The urban haze provides then a rather primitive smoke signal through which global urban de-evolution might be decoded, and a troubling metonym within which cities such as Mumbai come to represent new urban living and promise (Harris, 2012).

Such narratives are part of the international and state governance of megacity atmospheres by the problematization of the environment as a ‘milieu’. The governing and care of the population occurs within a climate of circular and causal effects. As we have seen, this is a space where disordered housing, industry, coal-fired power stations and massive auto-mobility cause high toxin levels which may lead to respiratory problems and raise temperatures, which may in turn cause higher death tolls during heatwaves. The quelling of such precipitous activities may create subsequent reductions in growth and development and putative threats to a population’s welfare. ² In other words, and whilst there are examples of long-term falling megacity pollution levels (see Mexico City), it is the megacity’s environment of interdependencies and connections which are both the source of its success as well as risks to their growth. Across megacities the world over, the acceleration of urban development moves hand in hand with the alteration of not only the urban surface but the aerial and atmospheric matter within which urban inhabitants must live. ‘Choked on Growth’ (Kahn and Yardley, 2007) is the sort of headline regularly describing the calamity facing Chinese cities as the dirty atmosphere becomes an unfortunate product of the desire for unmitigated progress. The modernization of the Indian economy has seen their cities defined and defiled in even worse terms still. Both examples place the problem of megacity climate within the domain of the lives of its population and the value that can be drawn from them (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). For one leading climate economist (Kahn, 2010), the equation of the problem is incredibly simple: as the megacity economies of the world grow so too does the ‘value of life’ and the ‘value of not being sick’.

In order to act on this space of circulation and interdependency, the indices of atmosphere, particulate matter and ozone – all essential air quality factors – set new ‘environmental’ constraints within the milieu that create a space of intervention over which the megacity population and its industries may or may not act. The problems are posed biopolitically and geopolitically, a folding seen even recently in the controversy of the United States’ air quality indicators above the US embassy in Beijing, reading way above official estimates. Moreover, the atmospheres move. India’s Asian cloud, first measured by the landmark INDOEX study, is affecting weather patterns in the entire region of the North Pacific as well as the Indian sub-continent. Singapore frequently complains of the extreme haze caused by Sumatran forest fires in Indonesia. Elsewhere air measurement devices, clean air acts and scientific laboratories are but one form of the subjectification of a population to their ‘atmospheric selves’ (Whitehead, 2009). In Lagos the threatening accumulation of haze over the city, a strange product of the Harmattan winds, is one example when governments intervene through advice to stay inside, adorn face-masks, and encourage the slowing of industrial production and transport restrictions. But this is far from emergency politics. In fact some commentators have suggested how the US embassy readings in Beijing have shown how the reverse is true during a recent smog warning:

… on the surface, it did not feel like an emergency in Beijing. Chinese, even expats, have grown wearily used to the bad air here. There were no angry lines outside pharmacies demanding more masks for the people. Traffic seemed no better or worse to me. In perhaps the most glaring illustrations that filthy air is accepted as the norm, I saw one apparently unconcerned citizen jogging while others took cigarette breaks. (Sinclair, 2013)

The atmospheres of Mumbai are not only susceptible to climate catastrophes in the country but fiscal and credit crunches, economic slowdowns and terrorist events. Just preceding the burning of the Taj hotel and the smoke rising from its roof and windows during the terror attacks in 2008, Manju imagines her sister Meena as a cartoon dragon exhaling smoke from her mouth and nose, burning on the inside out from the rat poison she has swallowed, mimicking the suicidal self-immolation of an Annawadi resident that is overhanging Abudul’s family with a court case. A few months later and Annawadi begins to feel the effects of the terror attacks at the Taj and the central railway station. The events tighten the stream of people and the money that flows with them to the airport and the informal economies of the waste pickers that sell on their wares to recycling companies. Even security has become meaner and more hostile; a constable beats Sunil to a pulp by stomping on his back.

Air Secession

… so one could also lament the splintering of the atmosphere. (Broch in Sloterdijk, 2009: 99)

Whilst the air/atmosphere has become a key medium and problematic for the care and protection of the megacity’s health, it is also increasingly part of the generic solutions that seek to secure the megacity from contemporary social and ‘environmental type’ threats (Massumi, 2009). In this context, the secessionary climates that populate the various developmental times of the contemporary megacity’s atmospheric representation are being accompanied by other processes of secession. The air’s differentiation and removal from the life of the populace permits a literal vertical hierarchy of air quality and atmospheric comfort which is inextricably bound up within practices of security of a capsular character (Klauser, 2010).

Within the informal settlements of Mumbai’s slums is the ‘ecology of odours’ Colin McFarlane (2008a: 190) describes from the unregulated mixing of flows and channels of cooking water and excremental waste, which are not so easily ‘flushed away’ by the control of water (Gandy, 2006). Air/atmospheres may often emerge from other material flows. The ‘autoscapes’ of the road and the street render scents of cooking, ‘cow dung’ and the fumes of the road (Edensor, 2002: 121) whilst the smells and fragrance collide with soundscapes of ‘human and animal noises’, music and car horns; this is a ‘changing symphony of diverse pitches, volumes, rhythms and tones’ (Edensor, 1998: 59). What seems clear amidst such imaginations of chaos are desires to escape this milieu, a goal of ‘differently-attuned, differently enveloped and differently air-conditioned others’ (Sloterdijk, 2008: 100).

What we must dwell on is a rising politics of sensibility premised on atmospheric comfort. David Bissell (2008) describes comfort as an ‘aesthetic sensibility’ or ‘affective resonance’ induced between bodies, objects, environments and other people. This is of the kind associated with the sensibilities expressed within elite public spaces and spaces of travel when passengers are invited to relinquish control and responsibility and experience a ‘soothing detachment’, cushioned by the variegated air of atmospheric comfort and quality (Atkinson and Blandy, 2009). Located within the 19th-century emergence of the railway passenger, for Virilio (Virilio and Degener, 2005) this produced a differentiated ‘politics of comfort’ where physical and sensual withdrawal was the name of the game.

In Annawadi, slum life is symptomatic of a broader Mumbai atmospheric politics – that which Boo calls an ‘ambient envy’ and neighbourly blame. From the Airport Road Annawadi cannot be seen, only its smoke plumes are evident because the slum is hidden by a concrete wall and tall aluminium fences plastered with advertisements for luxury goods. This kind of buffering belies the expansion of the airport outwards. The airport and its immediate locality can no longer give off an air of decrepit chaos and indecision but an impression of Mumbai’s positioning as a world city. The development and rehabilitation of the airport’s perimeter signs the airport’s ambitions as a gateway to India. It also realizes speculation on the vertical development of the nearby land, and more generally it helps to clean up Mumbai’s image abroad. This means that neighbourhoods like Annawadi are routinely effaced and forgotten. In both Mumbai and Delhi the slum populace become responsible for the atmospheres in which they subsist and yet over which they have little control.

This disparity is particularly clear in the development of so-called nuisance laws that middle-class communities have been using to direct the rehabilitation of nearby dwellings on the basis that slum atmospheres are an intolerable nuisance. In the way that the legal intervenes on the atmospheric, which intervenes on the livelihoods bound up in them – and let us not forget the Bombay Smoke-nuisances Act of 1912 set some of the preceding legislation for powers to prohibit the erection of kilns, furnaces and the manufacture of coke in particular areas of the city – today’s nuisance law legitimates urban renewal in the name of ‘re-habilitating’ Delhi’s and Mumbai’s urban slums, particularly because air is being labelled and valued as polluting. We see air redefined in a manner that has become the legal-juridical basis for what Ghernter calls a new paradigm or ‘nuisance law’ (Ghertner, 2010). This notion of nuisance is serving as the foundation for an atmospheric rationale that underlies municipal interventions on the lives on the poorest.

Oozing liquids, faecal matter, informal industrial pollutants and household waste constitute the unsanitary threat to social order and aesthetic sensibility of the rising urban middle classes. Mills, ‘smokestack industries’ and effluent producing manufacturing, since a court ruling in 2001, are to be ‘tucked away out of sight’, workers made to live ‘where their homes do not offend the eyes, ears and noses of the well-to-do’ (Baviskar, 2003). Delhi has since embarked on a decade-long period of slum clearance, contraction, removal and criminalization of the slum population by the new definition of a nuisance, defined as ‘any act, omission, injury, damage, annoyance or offence to the sense of sight, smell, hearing or which is or may be dangerous to life or injurious to health or property’ (Ghertner, 2008: 59). An annoying atmosphere is an air that is brought forth as an unwelcome presence, taking shape and registered through sensitivities to dirt, to smell, taste and sight. In this evolving legal discourse, the dwellings that make up the slums become inseparable from their status as social bother. Even more perniciously, the inhabitants of these dwellings are divorced from any categorization as reasonable citizens with rights over public land because only ‘unreasonable’ people are believed to live and pollute in this way. The open airs of nuisance are defecation in public areas because the toilets are inadequate or there is no such provision at all.

The curious fact is that, for Mumbai, the very techniques intended to secure the airport perimeter from slum contamination feed the material economy of flows of waste and materials that bleed into Annawadi. First, security strikes up unlikely alliances with some of the characters of Boo’s book, like Sunil, who bargains with the security guards of the Air India compound to sweep their workplace – so vigorously he inhales the whorl of the dust energetically loosened by his broom – and he takes away the cups and ketchup sachets they deposit at his feet in return for a profit. The security infrastructure provides rich pickings as well. Pieces of aluminium barriers, tire locks that the airport police latch onto rickshaws, electroplate and nickel. A ladder filched from a security kiosk would reach 1000 rupees, split five ways of course. But the death of Kalu leaves a ‘fog of shock and grief’ at the ease with which Kalu is dispensed with, the police tape quickly combining into a new arrangement with the flowers in the tidy gardens that line the terminal. Kalu is a nuisance case, the patch where his body lay soon filled in by the airport gardeners and the living, growing, airport vegetation.

The horizon of atmospheric security is not unrelated to the vertical. For Sunil, the roof to the airport gave him an odd sensation of exhilaration and intimacy, the voyeur he could never be on the ground. Elsewhere, and the secessionary politics of the megacity are nowhere more obvious than the utilization of the air in order to traverse the gridlocked streets (Cwerner, 2006; Graham and Marvin, 2001). New gated communities in São Paulo, well known for its high concentration of private helicopter use, are obvious examples. The ‘airborne limousines’ that dart ‘overhead, silhouetted against the hazy skyline’ (Murray, 2004: 150), serve high-tech enclaves such as Alphaville, a primary example of a ‘sequestered refuge’ for 32,000 permanent residents, served by 1100 security staff, three helipads, four-metre-high cement walls and barbed wire. Movement between these islands leaves behind the ‘science-fiction-like miasma of overcrowded streets, air pollution, and violent crime’ (Murray, 2004: 151). But the emergence of helicopter mobility for elites and wealthy middle classes is reproduced within more static vertical and atmospheric separations evidenced in the litany of skyscraper and high-rise developments.

The hermetically sealed shopping malls which Graham and Marvin (2001) have located illustrate how the separation of air and atmospheres is a simultaneous process of securitization and gentrification through the production of new urban natures, as David Gissen has explored in Manhattan (Gissen, 2009). Within the megacity, the model of the gated enclave is developing in its own fashion into the high-rise, preserving isolation by high value secessionary zones premised upon splintered infrastructural provisions of sanitation, energy and other air-services (McFarlane, 2008b). Reminiscent of the colonial city’s miasmic imaginations of emanated smells – and its policies of segregation and ‘islands of purity’ (McFarlane, 2008b: 419) – contemporary Mumbai realizes a repetition of history in the form of a kind of ‘foam city’ – apartment-style living. To borrow Sloterdijk’s (2009) terms, as a ‘spatialized immune system’, the developments filter out an outside space from the atmospherically regulated eco-system of the high-rises.

In the wake of the Commonwealth Games held in Delhi, Lord Sebastian Coe – in charge of the 2012 London Olympics – would state that delivering such successful global or mega-events required taking ‘sports out of their comfort zones’ (Muhlvenny, 2010). Yet it was the precise nature of comfort which had raised such furore amongst competitors travelling to the megacity. The hastily constructed apartments were accused of being less than habitable. Leaking air conditioning units and bare wires from other partially finished residential blocks and athlete sports villages appeared as front page news. The event’s comforting atmospheres were irrevocably connected to security and separation. Indeed, the leaky air conditioning which seemed to have threatened the Scottish athletic team’s safety was described by the UK Health Protection Authority’s instructions to travellers as the best form of ‘room protection’ from airborne mosquito viruses such as Dengue fever, by creating an inhospitably cool atmosphere for mosquito survival.

The question of comfort, however, is also about the construction of archipelagos of ‘mega-event’ atmospheres, shadowed by the ‘bubble to bubble’ security that would predominate in the effective enclosure of the sports teams from the rest of the city’s environment, even as they travelled. Such a logic would be continued in London’s Olympics two years later. For Coe, once more, the right atmosphere would be vital; the ‘buzzy atmosphere’ (Muhlvenny, 2010) of the event’s ‘highly secured spheres of emotion’ and ‘confidence’ (Klauser, 2010) are preserved within separated and securitized enclaves represented so well by the main Jawaharlal Nehru Sports Complex. Within Delhi, the megalith was separated by its own climate of auto-sprinkling technology, an ozone system for air freshening, a low-power air conditioning system, lush natural grass and on-site and distributed security systems through the transit network

Whilst these developments may hint at the extremes that in the context of Lagos Matthew Gandy describes as ‘a fragmentary, polarised and unstable urban space’ (2006: 387) – an impossible public realm at which the government can only react with an ‘air of exasperation’ (p. 376), Sloterdijk’s thesis should be taken a little more critically in these contexts. We should err on the side of caution in taking the processes he describes as ‘an accomplished fact’ (Thrift, 2009) and rather see them as trajectories of possibility. Segregation is not absolute either; the ‘physical and atmospheric separation of inside and outside’ is always an ‘ambiguous continuity’ (2010: 333) writes Francisco Klauser.

Mega-urban air/atmospheres might also be brought into conversations with analysis of the materialities of water and sanitation from which particular atmospheres might be effused. Moreover, like water, atmospheric isolation is always subject to some little excesses, slippages and leakage. Further still, we should not forget that the honeycomb-like enclaves Sloterdijk describes, and pockets of atmosphere Stewart steers us to, are not dead precisely because of their internal atmospheres of ‘togetherness’ and ‘shared life’ (Atkinson and Blandy, 2009), despite the overwhelming poverty or the extremes and excesses of wealth they enclose. Collectives may well be obvious emergent properties in the sites, zones and spaces of the poor as well as the middle classes, distinctive forms of community built on the prioritization – however unequal – of comfort, warmth, and consolation.