‘Summoning’ Wind for Urban Cooling: Urban Wind Corridor Projects in China

Abstract

Rapid development in East Asian cities over past decades has not only brought a wealth and economic boom but also has caused various environmental problems, one of which is the urban heat island effect and related dust and haze. This chapter focuses on an urban-cooling governance with a focus on building an urban ventilation corridor project in Wuhan, a well-known ‘stove city’ in China suffering high temperature during summer. The pioneer project in Wuhan aims to cool the urban temperature by institutionally creating a pathway of wind through the city-level master plan. Wuhan also has the knowledge network of the plan of ventilation corridors, given that the Huazhong University of Science and Technology based in Wuhan is one of the leading research nodes of the urban ventilation corridors with interacting overseas research institutes to transfer related knowledge to other Chinese cities. Research questions for this chapter include: what is the social and political process of the weather governance, including the establishment of urban ventilation corridors and implementation of rain enhancement? What stakeholders and professional communities should be mobilised? And how is meteorological knowledge produced and institutionalised to be used on the cooling issue? We argue that the case of Wuhan represents a specific way that the Chinese state attempts to mitigate environmental problems by integrating and implementing new meteorological technologies and services. While new technologies and a powerful state together enable the implementation of weather governance to influence the nature system more than ever before, the huge influence also brings about unpredictable results environmentally and socially.