Death by air

Australia is a car dependent country. A majority of people travel to work by car in all Australian states and capital cities. And poor or no access to public transport is quoted as the main reason for people to drive to work or study. The recent finding that the death of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, a nine-year-old girl in the UK, is attributed to air pollution draws attention to an often-ignored fact; air pollution kills. In fact, air pollution is a serious threat to our health and wellbeing, and we need to reconsider the way we are living in and designing our cities.

Last week’s landmark decision from the Coroner’s Court in London found that air pollution substantially contributed to the death of nine-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s seven years ago. Ella suffered from serious asthma and died after almost three years of serious illness. Living close to South Circular Road, a major road on the outskirts of London, exposed Ella and her family to high levels of nitrogen dioxide. Dangerous levels that contributed to her ill health and the asthma-attack that led to her death.

Ella’s reoccurring incidents of poor health coincided with episodes of high air pollution in the area where she lived. The coroner concluded that the levels of nitrogen dioxide in the air where Ella lived exceeded the World Health Organization’s guidelines. The dangerous levels of air pollution persisted for a prolonged period of time despite efforts to reduce them. Following Ella’s death, the government has promised to oversee transport in the area and to reduce the pollution.

The harms of ambient air pollution are well-known, although, perhaps more associated with smoke from nearby bushfires, rubbish burning, and to particular locations such as near coal-fired power plants and in countries such as China, India and Bangladesh, than to transport in capital cities in the UK or Australia. The London Coroner’s decision contradicts this assumption. Instead, air pollution in heavily trafficked areas is harmful and even lethal. And what is worse, it affects those struggling economically more since they cannot always choose where to live. The World Health Organization estimate that nine out of ten people breathe air that exceeds their pollution guidelines and that annually about seven million people die as a result.

Apart from contributing to global warming, private vehicles cause harmful and deadly air pollution in our cities. We need to reconsider our options and prioritise extending the public transport network across Australia. Moreover, locating job opportunities across the city will reduce the need to travel. Finally, we need to closely monitor air quality around residential areas to minimise the risk of exposing people to hazardous levels of pollution.

Fire and fever: a new spatial awareness

My first post on this site treated the toxic Melbourne air as a result of the large bushfires burning around the country. In that post I considered how the toxicity of the air changed the way air looked and smelled, making us suddenly aware of its presence. The threat of bad air heightened our awareness of our senses, allowing us to pick up on any irregularities in the air. I would argue that it changed the way that we interacted with the space around us, including the normally unnoticed gaseous aspects of that space. Although today, the continued fires around Australia are all but vanished from our minds, a similar awareness of the space around us is evident during the current coronavirus pandemic. The disease has sensitised us to the air and spaces around us and their potential harmfulness. The virus, just like the toxic air, makes us attentive to space in new and unexpectant ways.

To demonstrate, think of your most recent visit to the supermarket. Weren’t you suddenly acutely aware of every part of your body (and even clothes) that were in direct contact with the spaces and objects around you? It was almost as if you were left with a burning invisible mark on your hand after having picked up the shopping basket. As you walked around the shop were you not intensely conscious of the way other people were moving in relation to you? Someone was standing too close to the brand of soymilk you wanted to grab so you hesitate for an extra movement, waiting for them to move on. As you turned around a corner, looking for the non-existent liquid hand soap did you not almost bump into someone moving towards you and suddenly, without thinking, you found yourself holding your breath? Some of us have taken to protective measures such as disposable gloves and face masks, attempting to create a protective barrier between ourselves and the outside world. Others, we are almost too fearful to go outside at all. As you escaped the supermarket you took your first deep breath in a while and made your way home, still feeling the germs burning the skin of your hands. The current health crisis has heightened our sense of touch to a point where we can feel the burning of unclean skin, it has sensitised us to our place in relation to the space and the people around us and it has made us intensely aware of the sounds and signs of flu symptoms.

These are new experiences for most of us and they can be understood as a different awareness of space. The invisible virus threatening us cannot be seen by the naked eye, yet it is perceived by every part of our body. The fact that we do not know if it is there makes us constantly assume that it is. Sure, we might slip up for a moment, moving our unclean hands to our faces, but we soon remember, kicking ourselves for our mistake. Of course, we were always aware that venturing into public space and the proximity of other people meant exposing ourselves to the risk of different forms of infections. However, never before have we been so keenly aware of the risk. Similar to the way the toxic air during the bushfire season made us aware of its existence, we are becoming cognisant of the fact that the virus might be present in the air that we move through or the places that we touch. Once this virus no longer is considered everywhere around us, most of us will return to moving through space in a manner similar to before. Nonetheless, just as with the air during the bushfires I think that, in a way, the virus pandemic will come to slightly change our relationship to space for quite some time.

For more considerations on the sounds of the pandemic and what it does to us, have a listen to the podcast ‘Listening to the city in a global pandemic’.

Attuning to air and atmosphere

Over the Christmas holidays, I left Melbourne to spend a few weeks in Sweden with my family. A few days before my return to Melbourne I was reached by the news that Melbourne was experiencing reduced air-quality due to drifting smoke from the large bushfires along the Victorian coast. As I landed in Melbourne a few days later, the air quality was very bad. It was the morning on the 15^th of January, the air was glimmering yellow in the morning light and it tasted off. Although air is necessary for survival, breathing is an unconscious reflex which is often forgotten about. However, Choy reminds us that in places where air quality is bad, it becomes a topic of medical, political and social importance. Decreased air quality forces us to think about the atmosphere in more concrete ways. I know that for me, to check the air quality in my neighbourhood has now become a regular part of my morning routine. I have also downloaded an app which gives me daily updates, similar to weather notifications. Apart from employing such technological means of control, I am increasingly aware of the sight, taste and smell of the air. Preferably, air should not be seen or tasted but during bad days it is like you can see the dust and the chemical particles moving in the air, smell dirt in the wind and sense the minute particles through your taste buds. Twice so far, I have run around my house at night whiffing, after having detected an unusual smell, only to draw the conclusion that it must be coming from the air outside.

So, at least for me, the fact that air quality has become an issue in the city where I live is making me aware of air in ways that I previously was not. In addition, the fact that the air quality is not constant but rather erratic and changing intensifies this experience. A few years back I spent some months in Mexico City. At the time I would sometimes hear reports of the damage of breathing the air there being equivalent to smoking a packet of cigarettes a day or something to that effect. That is not a pleasant thing to hear but something that I quietly accepted and mostly avoided thinking about. The bad air was constant and largely due to the compact and laxly regulated traffic in the city. Nonetheless, the consistency of the air allowed me, for the most part, to forget about it. Similarly, recently I was complaining to my partner about the bad air in Melbourne and he, who had just returned from a trip to his hometown Dhaka, Bangladesh, answered by telling me about the air quality in Dhaka which often reaches hazardous levels. This of course does not stop people from going about their daily activities and I highly doubt they check the air-quality index each morning. Since, I believe, once again, the air quality is always pretty bad. In contrast, recent bad air in Melbourne has been a temporary and varying condition. ‘Hazardous’ air in the morning might be ‘moderate’ in the afternoon and ‘good’ the next day. Although the air quality has been good for a while, before going for a run I check the air to make sure that it hasn’t decreased.

Whether this acute attention to air would last even if the air quality continued to fluctuate, I do not know. Perhaps even that we would get used to. But for now, many people around Melbourne are on hyperalert for bad air and hazardous conditions as bushfires around the state are expected to burn all summer. This puts us in touch with air and the atmosphere within which air circulates in new, terrifying and exciting ways. Whether this attunement to air will lead to a change in behaviour or stricter carbon emission targets, is yet too early to say. What is clear is that we now exist in an atmosphere of increased climate urgency, which is making many people realise that climate change is affecting us here and now, not only there and then.