Cities and the activities urban infrastructures enable have long been noted for making demonstrable impacts on the surrounding atmosphere. Cities also provide unique social and political infrastructures, promoting particular forms of cohesion and fracture, including opportunities for promoting political consciousness and inspiring collective activism. This paper introduces the concept of “atmospheric infrastructures” to examine both of these facets of urban health as well as the dynamic relationship between them. It builds on a growing literature on “affective atmospheres” which explores how collectively-experienced emotions and senses are linked to specific locales, and an emerging line of scholarship that foregrounds the duality of atmospheres as both affective spaces and constitutive of the air we breathe. Frequently underplayed, however, in analyses of affective atmospheres is the role of (human and non-human) agency. I propose viewing urban spaces as atmospheric infrastructures in order to highlight issues of collective responsibility in the constitution of both kinds of (meteorological and affective/political) atmospheres. My analysis is situated in responses to air pollution in the Czech Republic, where social activists frequently frame respiratory health as a citizenship issue, fighting for the health of the city (rather than of individuals), and value civic education as much as protesting against pollution.
Susanna Trnka is a social/cultural and medical anthropologist based in Aotearoa/New Zealand and a professor at the University of Auckland.
photo credits: Pavel Sonnek
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
6-7:30 pm CEST
@ IfEE, room 408 & on Zoom
For further information and the Zoom link, please write to Elisabeth Luggauer (elisabeth.luggauer@hu-berlin.de).
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Everybody is very welcome to join!
The talk will be in English, and questions can, of course, also be asked in German!