Why Study the Seasons? Reflections on the Question of Urban Temporalities

The Temporal Scales of Seasons, Weather, and Climate

Thinking about urban temporalities raises the question of scale, as Schlichting and Sharma point out in the introduction. Weather, climate, and the seasons operate on different, though related, temporal scales. Working on a microscale that changes daily or sometimes even hourly, weather is highly dynamic and subject to constant flux. Weather itself has a history and it also shapes history, but due to its mercurial nature, weather has not been much studied by urban historians. ⁶ But talking about the weather is far from meaningless because weather links each person’s existence to the troposphere, something far beyond our earth-bound and relatively short human existence. ⁷ Current concerns about climate change sometimes lead to a conflation of weather and climate. But as experts keep pointing out, weather is not the same as climate, even though the latter plays a significant role in the former and vice versa. Whereas weather centers on rather short-term phenomena, climate covers time frames measuring decades, centuries, or even millennia—time scales that are usually not of central concern to most urban historians. ⁸ Climate change and its planetary consequences force us to gain a better understanding of such long-term processes and to find solutions or ways of mitigation. Cities play a central role in all of this. ⁹ The ecological footprints and climate impact of cities are substantial, but cities also hold tremendous potential for implementing new modes of environmental sustainability. ¹⁰ Finding such solutions, among other things, requires a critical understanding of how we got to where we are. In other words, if we want to find solutions for cities in the age of climate change, (urban) history matters, and the seasons might provide us with valuable empirical evidence to analyze urban environmental developments and their sociocultural, political, and economic entanglements.

The seasons bridge weather and climate in a perceptible way. Seasons offer a bounded temporal frame (usually a couple of months) tied to the localized specificities of geography and place. Cities function as nodal points on planet earth, and the seasons remind us that these nodal points also link each city across many scales all the way to the sun and the rotating dynamic of the solar system. The budding leaf on a street tree in spring is a tiny embodied reminder of this connection, as is the snow flake, or the summer solstice. The exact dimensions of this cyclical dynamic depend on a number of factors, including the location, topography, and geographical coordinates of a given city; naturally, each city has a distinct seasonal temporality. Tokyo has a different seasonal makeup than New York, and Berlin has a different seasonal composition than Helsinki or even Munich or Vienna. Why does that matter, you might ask—why should historians or urban scholars, more generally, be bothered by that?

The seasons divide the year into different segments and annually recurring periods that turn abstract spaces into embodied places. Cities in the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere usually have four seasons, while cities in tropical regions tend to have a dry and a wet or monsoon season. Cities near the equator often don’t really experience seasonal variations at all. Phenologists even distinguish between twelve seasons based on the blossoming of plants. ¹¹ But people also refer to many other seasonal signifiers such as the flu season, the carnival season, or the strawberry season. Seasonal effects are driven by environmental factors that can also carry cultural implications, as Chris Pearson shows with the dog days of summer in nineteenth-century New York City. Seasons can also be distinctly cultural, like the festivals and cultural events mentioned by Dümpelmann and Furnée. Sports often have their specific season. The German language even differentiates between Jahreszeit and Saison to distinguish between these two types of seasons, one referring to the ecological and the other to the cultural kind of season.

Seasonal Change and Continuity in the Urban

Cities are rhythmic spaces and the seasons are one manifestation of these rhythms. ¹² One explanation why the seasons have been mostly overlooked by urban historians, especially of the modern period, might have to do with the historical understanding of urban time itself. The process of urbanization could be read as a concerted (modern) effort to overcome the human dependence on natural limitations, including seasonal constraints that had shaped the daily lives of people in many parts of the world, particularly the global north. Cyclical rhythms of the rural, the argument goes, were replaced by more linear rationalized notions of time premised on the division of work and leisure. In modern cities, these linear, abstract, and production-oriented temporalities of work and leisure were increasingly dictated by machines and capitalist economics. Technological innovation became another driving force in this struggle for human emancipation from the seasons and rural ways of life. For instance, gas and especially electric light freed people from the dependence on daylight. ¹³ This growing independence was a key factor in the advancement of industrial production. The assembly line—enigma of industrial productivity—could only operate cost-efficiently if it ran without long interruptions like nighttime. Ideally, it should operate non-stop. The meat packing industry of Chicago was at the forefront of these developments in the nineteenth century. Traditionally, meat packing had been a seasonally dependent enterprise—livestock could only be slaughtered during certain months of the year when it was neither too cold nor too hot. Once people like Gustavus Swift integrated electricity and new refrigeration and cooling technologies in the 1870s and 1880s, meat packing was freed from seasonal constraints and could become a highly economized and rationalized disassembly year-round production. ¹⁴

And it was not just capitalist production that depended on overcoming the natural limitations of day and night or, more generally, seasonal fluctuations—the notion of modern urbanity itself is usually equated with such a 24/7 dynamic or the proverbial “city that never sleeps.” ¹⁵ Many urban supply-(infra)structures also follow this 24/7 ideal of late capitalism. Consumers usually do not see the elaborate efforts behind the seemingly constant supplies of energy that allow our cities to operate. ¹⁶ In the postwar boom years, electricity companies invested tremendous efforts and know-how in regulating peak energy uses. For instance, when thousands of people came home from work on a fall evening and more or less simultaneously turned on their lights or electric appliances, the grid had to operate without crashing. Similarly, during times of summer heat, when many urbanites turned on their air conditioners, grids had to absorb these spikes in energy consumption. The history of these urban engineering feats to overcome seasonal constraints through technological means, in large part, awaits scholarly investigation. Usually, we only acknowledge these endeavors when systems break down—when the trains stop running because of snow and ice, or when blackouts occur due to system overload. ¹⁷

Urbanites certainly have been freed from many seasonal constraints. As we learn from Tatsuya Mitsuda, the shift from thermal solidarity to thermal comfort was a major force in the urbanization of postwar Tokyo and Japan more generally. In fact, many cities across the globe could not have expanded without major technological interventions that made living conditions bearable. Rapid urban growth in the Southwest of the United States or in Florida, for example, went hand in hand with the spread of air conditioning to mitigate extreme summer temperatures. ¹⁸ Similarly, the rise of cities like Dubai, Singapore, or Doha as centers of a global economy would not have occurred, for better or worse, without such climate control technologies. ¹⁹

In other cities, it was not heat but seasonal cold that posed challenges. Cities in northern climates in particular are frequently exposed to harsh and extended winterly conditions including snow, ice, and cold temperatures. In some cities, urbanites made concerted efforts to embrace these conditions. In the 1880s, for example, some Canadian cities like Montréal and Quebec instituted special winter festivals to celebrate the season, a practice that continues in the present in cities like Edmonton. ²⁰ With regard to the built environment, some architects and urban planners even proposed a special “Winter City” approach to urban design. ²¹ Criticizing that “our perpetual summer state of mind has been a serious impediment to the development of meaningful solutions for comfortable winter living,” Norman Pressman, a pioneering figure in this movement, proposed a more environmentally conscious vision toward building northern cities that embraced rather than eschewed winter as an urban season. ²² Efforts to promote this kind of thinking even led to the formation of a Winter City Association in 1982 that served as a promotional political platform for the exchange of knowledge about and experiences in winter cities across the globe.

Obviously, seasons provide us with distinct perspectives on a wide variety of environmental and cultural aspects of urban life. They affect everyone, but not in the same way. Class matters, as does gender, ethnicity, and age. As Jan Hein Furnée shows, changes in social stratification manifested themselves not only in linear but also cyclical ways. As he argues with regard to leisure activities, class distinctions intensified during the winter season, in part because indoor activities like the theater often revolved around more exclusionary practices tied to entrance fees, particular attires, and behavioral norms. By extension, one might argue that summer, on the other hand, tended to be more egalitarian; after all, class distinctions were literally dressed down in a bathing suit. Outdoor activities during summer tend to be more public, and hence, often more accessible to a broader spectrum of people. But class distinctions did not disappear during the summer months either. While wealthy Berliners, Parisians, and Viennese could travel to seaside resorts and thus escape the discomfort of their cities’ summer heat, poorer populations usually had to stay and make do with whatever heat relief cities had to offer. ²³ For some New Yorkers, for instance, this meant trying to sleep on the roof of their tenements or illegally opening fire hydrants for some cooling sprinkles. ²⁴ In Tokyo, as Tatsuya Mitsuda tells us, departing the city for seaside resorts even raised criticism. Many viewed this as a selfish act that undermined the dictates of social and thermal solidarity, which was considered a Japanese national trait. Seaside vacations were criticized, at least initially, as a sign of westernized individualism and ego centricity. Over time, these criticisms disappeared in favor of westernized notions of thermal comfort.

Apart from class distinctions, gender also mattered, especially in bourgeois society. Well into the twentieth century, fashions were often more heat sensible for men than for women. As a measure of chastity, women, especially those of the upper classes, were expected to cover up in heavy garments much longer than men. In Tokyo, more airy fashions, especially for women, were associated with westernized styles, which some celebrated and others criticized. Women, Tatsuya Mitsuda points out, were at the forefront of a “thermal emancipation,” which also included housework activities like redecorating during the summer months. Similar practices could be observed in the West. Seasonal gender distinctions also manifested themselves in other areas of urban life such as taking care of urban greenery, including tree planting and other seasonal maintenance activities like collecting seeds, as Sonja Dümpelmann documents in her essay. In these kinds of activities, children also played a significant role. For them, engaging with seasonal pursuits like collecting lady bugs and other beetles, or feeding wild birds during winter was viewed as an educational exercise. In that sense, the seasons also underscore that age functioned as a crucial category of social distinction. Children and the elderly—two often overlooked urban social groups—move to the fore with regard to seasonal activities and vulnerabilities. The European heat wave of 2003 exposed how the elderly were especially affected and at risk. ²⁵ In a similar vein, heat waves have revealed differences in the social and ethnic cohesion of neighborhoods. ²⁶ More season-oriented histories will help us to localize the urban interdependencies of environmental and cultural forces because urban manifestations of seasonality acculturate the natural. They also reveal how we sometimes naturalize the cultural, for instance, when we speak of pothole season as if it were a natural occurrence rather than a manifestation of poor road construction and missing funds.

On the Architecture of Knowledge Regimes

Knowledge regimes possess their own historicities, and the study of seasonality provides a unique window into the sociocultural and techno-scientific production of knowledge and its temporal implications. The history of public hygiene and health offers a case in point. When public hygiene emerged as a sociomedical field of investigation and intervention in the early nineteenth century, seasonal aspects were used as one indicator to measure health risks. Descriptions of the urban environment often referenced seasonal factors like heat, precipitation, the flowering of certain plants, or frost to assess the miasmic threats contributing to urban pollution and the reoccurrence of contagious diseases in human and animal populations. Cholera, rinderpest, and numerous respiratory diseases were explained in relation to seasonal variations. Historical accounts of the public hygiene movement sometimes mention seasonal factors, but usually only in passing. ²⁷ Given their focus on human intentionality, seasonal factors “naturally” moved to the background, particularly in examinations of the shift from miasmic to microbe-oriented explanations of nineteenth-century hygiene and disease. But what would such a foregrounding have revealed about cities? As some of the essays in this special section document, seasonal changes led to the intensification of certain health problems in humans, animals, or plants. As Sonja Dümpelmann mentions, certain diarrheal diseases among children could be related to particular phenological periods. The phenomenon of seasonal allergies such as hay fever have their own medical and cultural histories that were frequently linked to urban living. Late nineteenth-century American medical practitioners associated hay fever with an increased sensitivity toward environmental pollutants by middle-class urbanites. ²⁸ Exposure to ragweed, which was prevalent in urban areas along the eastern seaboard of North America, could lead to an overactive immune system. As a remedy, doctors recommended countryside retreats during the months of highest seasonal exposure.

This association of seasonal health problems and urban living was not just a historical phenomenon. In recent years, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) has been identified as a medical condition and mental disorder that is supposedly especially prevalent among urban populations of northern climates. First described in 1984, it entails a deep sense of sadness usually associated with winter and the lack of light. ²⁹ With regard to knowledge regimes, SAD serves as an example of the increased medicalization of Western societies. This medicalization, according to sociologist Alissa Overend, led to an increasingly rigid normative reading of human behavior that pathologized seasonal mood swings as a disorder requiring medical attention and pharmaceutical alleviation. ³⁰ While Overend acknowledges that some people might suffer from a seasonal depressive state, she also cautions us against automatically equating seasonal mood changes with a disorder. Instead, she calls for a deeper cultural contextualization and a more inclusive understanding that incorporates traditional rituals and indigenous knowledges. Overend illustrates how seasonal mood changes are filtered through certain knowledge paradigms—medicalization in the case of SAD—and how a more temporality-sensitive reading of urban living might enable us to value variation as diversity rather than abnormality or disorder.

Other areas where we see a notable engagement with knowledge about seasonality is in debates about architecture, the use of building materials, and the technologies of climate control. In the old sections of many Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, or East Asian cities, we still find remnants of pre-modern architectural set-ups characterized by narrow pathways, shuttered windows, and airy inner courtyards. These layouts attest to a more climate conscious understanding of architecture geared to protect its inhabitants from seasonal constraints, most notably heat and excessive sunshine. Narrow pathways provided shade and cooling. In contrast, many postwar neighborhoods usually display a different building philosophy where traditional indigenous understandings were replaced by new building styles (usually consisting of concrete) that centered on technological means to overcome seasonal travails. ³¹ The modern skyscraper is the perfect example of such a building type. Instead of environmental integration, its architecture, for the most part, has been premised on isolation and the creation of a new sealed techno-centered environment that clearly separated the inside from the outside. ³² As a result, skyscrapers could be built almost anywhere regardless of climate and seasonal variations. Indeed, they became the embodiment of modern urbanization around the globe. But this also came at a high price for cities worldwide. The insular worlds of the skyscraper required massive amounts of fossil-fuel-generated energy to maintain sealed interior environments that were largely independent of seasonal constraints and climatic conditions, but over time, they became a substantial driver of the urban heat island effect. ³³

As we learn from Tatsuya Mitsuda, the shift from thermal solidarity to thermal comfort was a major force in the urbanization of postwar Tokyo and Japan more generally. As his essay shows, the effects of new building materials, particularly the use of concrete, replaced natural, wind-circulation-centered cooling methods with air-conditioning technologies. While air conditioning might have offered a greater independence from the thermal constraints of summer heat, its increasing use contributed notably to the urban heat island effect and the overuse of energy. Hence, the short-term gain of thermal comfort also entailed negative long-range consequences like the urban heat island effect, which, in turn, further intensified negative seasonal forces. In some places, older mechanisms of heat control are being rediscovered. For example, in the historical district of Dubai’s Al Bastakiya, one still finds traditional style wind towers known as barjeels that use a century-old method of cooling believed to have originated in ancient Egypt and Persia (Figure 1). These towers use the flow of incoming winds and direct them through pressure to cool the inside of buildings, especially during the blistering summer months when temperatures frequently rise above 110°F. ³⁴ In neighboring Abu Dhabi, this principle has been adapted for modern-day use in Masdar, a so-called model city project of low-carbon emissions (Figure 2). ³⁵

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Figure 1.

Dubai traditional wind tower.

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Figure 2.

Masdar wind tower.

As the images indicate, architectural aesthetics played a rather different role in each of these versions of cooling mechanisms, but the underlying principle of seasonal heat regulation is similar. As they function as passive cooling mechanisms, they are being “rediscovered” by architects in many Middle Eastern and North African cities along the Tropic of Cancer where summers tend to be extremely hot. ³⁶

Paying closer attention to different knowledge regimes regarding seasonal variation will shed new light on different modes of knowledge production and their application in urban development across cultures and time periods. This might also foster a more critical perspective on alleged notions of technological progress and its impact on long-range processes of climate change. ³⁷ By paying attention to the diversity of cultures, past practices, and different types of (indigenous) knowledge regarding seasonal practices, we might discover rich reservoirs of alternative know-how and varying visions about urban development. At the same time, we have to retain a critical perspective on how some of these knowledges were produced and implemented, particularly in colonial contexts, as scholars like Jiat-Hwee Chang and Anthony King have pointed out in relation to tropical architecture. ³⁸

Conclusion

The seasons remind us that cities depend on more than human intentionality. Surely, cities were spurred by human ingenuity, and they attest to the technological advances in overcoming numerous seasonal perils related to heat, cold, the lack of light, and other adverse effects. But the impact of seasonal variations on the urban also reminds us that city dwellers remain part of a natural environment and planetary constellation. To historians, whose primary conceptual interests revolve around questions of time, seasonal variations and their impact on the sociocultural life of urban dwellers should matter because they expose the interrelations of multiple temporal layers ranging from the brevity of weather to the longue durée of climate. Much remains to be done in this field of inquiry, both empirically and conceptually, and luckily our source base is broad. Ranging from all types of media to the arts, from technological manuals to health reports, architectural treaties and landscape publications, sources from experts and lay persons alike that illuminate seasonality await critical analysis by urban scholars. Moreover, voices that have often been overlooked, for instance, those of children or the elderly, can be brought to bear on these kinds of investigations. We should also investigate the knowledges that have been forgotten or those that were intentionally ignored, negated, and replaced by allegedly more rational and marketable modes of techno-scientific knowledge production. Scientific knowledge plays a fascinating role in this process because, on one hand, science offered many important new insights and ways of understanding; at the same time, western scientific discourses also displaced many alternative, often more traditional, sources of knowledge production and discovery that were dismissed as folklore or esotericism. Paying attention to the scientific discourses about seasons and the urban also challenges us to rethink our engagement with sources, and how we can integrate the natural sciences to explain urban processes, but also how we can read culture into alleged natural phenomena. The seasons remind us of human nature, and hopefully also of our humanity as we help others who are more exposed to the elements—the homeless, the elderly, construction workers, and climate refugees. Perhaps we can show solidarity not just in suffering but also in counteracting the perils of climate change, a solidarity that should reach beyond humans to also include animals, plants, and the planet as a whole.