Cities as Atmospheric Infrastructures: An Analysis of Activist Responses to Respiratory Illness in the Czech Republic

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 and the dynamic relationship between them. It builds on a growing literature on 'affective atmospheres' that 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 nonhuman) 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 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.