Planetary Disconnections of Urban Atmospheres: How New York Turned into New Delhi

By Vasundhara Bhojvaid, Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence

Air Pollution’s Ground Zero

Urban atmospheres typify the state of the air in a city. This allows for global comparisons based on how livable a city is in terms of the effects of air quality on human health. As I will show this is precisely what emerged in June 2023 when the atmospheres of New Delhi and New York were compared in the Indian media. In the process there was a tendency to overlook and obscure the regional and planetary connections of causes and effects of pollution, as cities were understood as units that enclose their respective atmospheres. Through this comparison a hierarchy of better living in a particular city versus another is established, while concealing the myriad effects and people impacted beyond a city’s boundaries.  

New Delhi, the capital city of India has been increasingly constituted as an urban space of noxious and toxic fumes, regularly infamous as the most polluted city in the world since the World Health Organization released its air pollution database in 2014. This characterization is encountered materially and created discursively, as an “all enveloping experience” (Ingold 2011, 134) in and through which people perceive. This perception is constantly in flux as air is fluid and always in motion so that it is difficult to seize or hold, thus evading any form of human and technological capture. In New Delhi the suspicious air is materially present in every breath, wheeze, and cough impacting the bodies that live in the city’s air, sedimented in human lungs as particulate matter that enters the bloodstream and gets caught in filters in the air purifiers of privileged homes. Discursively the city has been termed “Ground Zero” for air pollution (Gardiner 2019). There has been an exponential increase of publications (in both academic and popular media) studying and relaying the effects of the toxic air. The city has enacted policies, and air pollution has become an increasingly relevant election campaign issue (at the city, regional, and national levels). 

In my anthropological research on how air pollution is affecting and affected by policies, transforming life in urban spaces and understandings of the body, I have been struck by these developments as I remind myself that the air we live and breathe in continues to flow, drift and swirl beyond any human-made boundary, such as a city’s limits. Historically there was a move from the individual sensorial perception of the quality of air in relation to place – through smell, temperature, and movement – to scientifically accurate standards that qualified the quality of air (Boer 2016). And yet, there is more at play as contestations continue over the factors that affect air quality in New Delhi, which are a combination of local and transboundary sources (beyond state and national boundaries), as the air moves. This is evidenced in countless scientific reports that aim to qualify the causes of the quality of the air in New Delhi and differ in their findings, some arguing that up to 40% of the city’s air quality is a result of sources from outside the city (TERI 2018). Others state that the city’s air quality in certain years has been compounded by sand particles that blow in from the desert state of Rajasthan in north-western India and even as far as the Gulf. In other words it is difficult to ascertain factors and spaces whence the air quality of the city is being detrimentally effected. They are both local and transboundary and their effects are a result of topographical and atmospheric factors that are difficult to control. And yet, the exponential pace with which New Delhi has been infamously termed as the most (air) polluted city in the world, is worth taking notice of. 

Most perceptibly this is made apparent annually during the crop burning [1] season from September to December. Punjab, a state that adjoins New Delhi, is blamed for causing the state of the air quality in New Delhi to plummet. Images of farmers burning their crops relentlessly in Punjab fill Indian media outlets every year, as they report that they simply have no other cost effective options; which inevitably leads to a political brawl as municipal, state and national governments shift the responsibility onto one another for curbing New Delhi’s toxic air (PTI 2022). Surprisingly, the quality of air in the state of Punjab itself is seldom a focus of concern in these narratives. It is thought of as a source of the problem in New Delhi, with little attention to the lived conditions in rural parts of Punjab [2]. Thus, there is a simultaneous acknowledgement of the agentive quality of air (as it flows from the fields of Punjab into the city of New Delhi) and ignorance of the kinds of spaces that warrant attention on account of air quality (cities are being constituted as air pollution’s “ground zero” at the expense of rural areas, such as agricultural fields in adjoining states, like Punjab). With the city becoming the focal point in terms of effects of air quality on human health, urban lives are made to matter more, at the expense of farmers and others living near agricultural fields. Further, even though the links between air pollution and climate change have been established as an undeniable fact in international discourse, this connection does not yet figure prominently in how New Delhi imagines its air quality troubles.

New York gets New Delhi’d

With this background in mind, I was struck by how narratives in the Indian media described the descending toxic air in the city of New York in the first week of June 2023. While it was acknowledged that the thick, dark air blew into the city as a result of smoke from wildfires in Quebec, Canada, headlines of a photo news story declared “New York Turns New Delhi With Worst Air Ever,” with images of clouded, yellow skies depicting the perceptible bad air in New York. One image shows a screen-shot from an air quality app, listing the most polluted cities in the world, and exclaiming that New York has surpassed New Delhi. What atmospherics are at work here? The Air Quality Index (AQI) allows comparisons of air quality to be made across spaces such as cities (Choy 2011). The AQI is a weighted average that relates levels of pollutants in the air to human health [3]. In so doing, the AQI achieves a quantification of living in a city, which is then used to compare what it is like to live in another city, such that cities are being ranked according to the state of their air. It was precisely this metric that allowed New York to become New Delhi [4] in June 2023. Here, just like the quality of air in rural Punjab does not find mention, neither does the state of air in Quebec, which is the source of the dark fumes. 

How can we understand what is at play here? Hannah Knox (2020) advocates “Thinking Like a Climate”, an approach that argues that the materiality of form that climate change generates – data, visualizations and computer models – must be viewed as relational signs, with significatory capacities that impact and effect how symbolic thought emerges. The impetus is “to approach climate change not as a cultural practice with ontological dimensions but as a material process that exhibits epistemological qualities” (Knox 2020, 5). In so doing, the human and non-human and the material and the not-so material operate together as a nexus that allows for the sustenance, transformation and emergence of ideas. Do the two cities and their comparisons allow for “thinking like a climate?” It is likely that the wildfires in Quebec have been exacerbated by climate change and the long-distance travel of particulate matter across borders to New York is well-documented. In the same vein there is contestation over the transboundary nature of what makes the state of air so detrimental in New Delhi – sand particles from the Gulf, crop burning from adjoining states such as Punjab, in addition to sources from within the city’s limits like diesel vehicular pollution amongst others – that not only cause local pollution issues but indeed have planetary effects in the form of Black Carbon, a climate change aerosol.  Further the effects of local particulate matter are exacerbated by high ozone levels on hot summer days that ties in local effects of air pollution and planetary climate change. And yet the dominant discourse in the media seems to ignore these planetary consequences. The aerial imaginations that emerge from the toxic-air-affected cities narrate a conjoined materialism of urban spaces impregnated by viscous dark fumes that choke bodies and display dystopian skylines that are contained, limited to a porous transparent dome that encloses the city and those that live there. Just like one cannot see farther than a few blocks in a smoky haze, narratives of disastrous city air quality have obscured their planetary connections. The two urban atmospheres that emerged in June 2023, which were compared and whose comparison was virally shared on the AQI apps, were imagined as two discrete smoky domes, rather than two particularly populated spots along a long-distance corridor of traveling smoke. Had their smoky fates been represented as the regional phenomena that they are, with their myriad and differing causes (local pollutants exacerbating the incoming smoke from wildfires, agricultural fires, desert sands, and so on), the linking of New York as New Delhi (with articles about how New York could learn from New Delhi’s experience) may not have been so clear. It also begs the question - what understanding of progress is being encoded in statements that pronounce that New York is worse than New Delhi or what New York could learn from New Delhi. Is the implication that New York is in the company of “backward and underdeveloped” cities, until it is cured of the descending dark, choking air in its locales? Consideration of the experience of these two cities, and their handling in public discourses, reveal that urban atmospheres are without a doubt material, affectual and sensorial formations that endure in cities but must also be released from these local spaces to circulate and endure at planetary scales. 

Footnotes

[1] In India farmers burn off the stalks that are left over after harvest to clear their fields for the next season. This practice is also referred to as crop or paddy burning. 

[2] In India the Central Pollution Control Board under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change manages a nation-wide program of ambient air quality monitoring stations known as the National Air Quality Monitoring Program (NAMP). NAMP consists of 793 operating stations covering 344 cities/towns in 29 states and 6 Union Territories of the country, so that no rural spaces are covered under the network. This means that there is no official air quality data being generated for parts of Punjab where crop burning takes place. In other words, for India, there is ambient air quality data only for urban spaces. In order to make the network more representative of air quality across the country in the proposed National Clean Air Program (2019), the central government has indicated that monitoring stations will be expanded to regions beyond cities, but work on that will take time.

[3] The range of what ‘healthy’ to ‘severe’ levels are for the AQI is fixed by the national government and varies globally. This is done keeping in mind the state of air in a country, trends of air pollution and designing realistic policy goals for improving air quality.

[4] Since 2014, when the WHO air quality database declared New Delhi as the most polluted city in the world, narratives in Indian and international media have widely covered the recurrence of the city as the most polluted city. Since then, protests and demonstrations have become a regular feature and citizen awareness about air quality has seen a rise which is epitomised in air pollution becoming a political issue during elections (Khandari 2020). Premiere institutions such as some of the Indian Institutes of Technology are carrying out research on what causes the air quality to be so bad, and doctors have been campaigning and sharing experiences of their patients inflicted with weak lungs and asthmatic babies being born in the city.

References

Boer, Wulff. 2016. ‘Synthetic Air’. Future Anterior 13 (2): 76-101

Choy, Timothy. 2011. Ecologies of Comparison. An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Duke University Press. 

Gardiner, Beth. 2019. Choked. Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution. University of Chicago Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge.

Khandari, Bhavreen. 2020. ‘Delhi elections: How important an issue is environment.’ Down to Earth. February 7, 2020. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/air/delhi-elections-how-important-an-issue-is-environment-69197

Knox, Hannah. 2020. Thinking Like a Climate. Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change. Duke University Press.

PTI (Press Trust of India) 2022. ‘Farm fires' share in Delhi's pollution 38%, highest this season.’ The Hindu. Available at: https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/farm-fires-share-in-delhis-pollution-38-highest-this-season/article66090411.ece

TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute). 2018. Source Apportionment of PM2.5 & PM10 of Delhi NCR for Identification of Major Sources. Available at: https://www.teriin.org/sites/default/files/2018-08/Report_SA_AQM-Delhi-NCR_0.pdf