The Janus Face of Comfort: Climate, Housing, and Development in Cold War Latin America

PhD project
in the project Cooling the Global South: Technology, Society, and Thermal Regulation in the Twentieth Century (Emmy Noether-Programme der DFG)

This project examines the international efforts to provide housing in Latin America at the intersection of architectural, environmental, and development history between the 1940s and 1970s. Architects, planners, policymakers, and development agencies confronted the challenge of defining adequate, thermally habitable living environments for millions of families with limited economic means and without recourse to mechanical cooling. The project examines competing understandings of housing, climate, and comfort in the context of socio-economic development and argues that thermal comfort was not a universal or neutral standard, but a historically contingent field in which developmental priorities, climatic knowledge, technical expertise, and residents’ needs were negotiated.