The LA fires that wreaked havoc in Hollywood earlier this year were only one instance of many over the past years when wildfires ravaged communities and polluted the air. Apart from catastrophic wildfires, industry and vehicle emissions are sources of pollution many people experience on an everyday basis. With increasing levels of air pollution in the world’s biggest cities, it is perhaps no surprise to see the emergence of commodified and digital air as a new frontier of commodification and extraction: air domes, air purifiers, bottled mountain air, and digital air quality index applications (AQI-apps) are only a few examples of the ways in which society has responded to worsening air quality. But what do these developments mean in terms of the ways we inhabit and sense air?  

On a smog-infested January day in Beijing, a user on the social media platform Sina Weibo writes: “AQI app shows 400!!! I’m inside with the air purifier on.” In another time and part of the world, in a sweltering June, a Reddit user writes: “The smoke from the wildfires has reached New York. It is apocalyptic outside, and I’m blasting the air purifiers. Feels fine inside.”

Although the fate of these two social media users with their air purifiers is unknown, we may safely assume they survived the apocalypse, which stands in stark contrast to William Delisle Hay’s science fiction novella, The Doom of the Great City, from 1880.¹ Like the apocalyptic scenes described by the social media users’ of today, Hay’s fictional London is covered in a toxic soot blanket. But only a single person survives to tell the tragic story as the rest of Londoners suffocate to death. Needless to say, there are no air quality apps or air purifiers in this fictional London. And if there were – would it have made a difference? Can technology save us from air pollution? Probably not. But it can do a great deal of other things. 

In fact, these two social media comments exemplify ways in which technological and digital equipment have entered our relationship with the air. Not only that, these devices also have profound effects on how air is experienced. In these short descriptions, the outdoor and indoor air become different entities due to the air purifiers, which create a secluded and, allegedly, pure airscape indoors, as opposed to the apocalyptic scenes outside that are physically sensed and mediated through the AQI-numbers. The notion of airscapes suggests the construction and conceptualizations of different forms of air that we come to inhabit. These airscapes can be conceptualized simply by our sensual understanding of air, the report of others, digital and other types of technical equipment, or a combination of all the above. The question is what happens to our understandings of air when our experiences of air are increasingly mediated by digital devices? 

Bodily senses and airscapes

Seventy years before Hay’s novel, the London air is also a topic that vexes Mr. Woodhouse, a character in Jane Austen’s Emma from 1816. When learning about the many colds his eldest daughter and grandchildren have recently experienced, Mr. Woodhouse immediately finds the villain of these ills – the London air. 

“Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be. It is a dreadful thing to have you forced to live there! so far off!—and the air so bad!”²  

In his assessments of the London air, Mr. Woodhouse is not in the wrong. Historical records estimate that the city experienced a rapid worsening of air quality from the beginning of the 19th century, the presumed time frame in which Emma is set.³ Yet, unlike us, Mr. Woodhouse couldn’t know this through sensors, satellite imaging, or AQI-apps, providing the latest updates and forecasts. No, he used his senses or relied on the sensual experiences of others. Presumably agreeing with Mr. Woodhouse’s assessment of the London air, the family doctor has prescribed another type of air as a remedy for the illness-prone family – sea air and its salty winds. In Emma, air is thus categorized as the healthy rural air, the healthy sea air, and the toxic London air, forming airscapes based on bodily and emotional sensations of the air. 

Skip forward 200 years, and similar airscapes to the ones in Emma are artificially produced for consumption. There are air humidifiers and purifiers simulating sea-air for preserving health; there is bottled mountain air promising the consumer up to 160 breaths of fresh air, and let’s not forget about city air domes – a bubble like, inflatable structure of PVC fabric which pumps air into a designated area, protected from pollutants outside.⁴ These are artificially created micro-airscapes, presenting a controlled and limited airscape for those who can afford it. Moreover, they are formed regardless of our bodily sensations – they are based on someone else’s definition of air. The bottled air is proclaimed to be fresh and healthy; the air purifiers are certified to create beneficial sea air. In short, these artificial airscapes come with established ideas of air, and they are furthermore part of a larger invisible network of actors and their inbuilt understandings of air; notions which users may come to internalize. 

Of course, our bodies have not disappeared in the 21st century, nor have they been replaced by technological devices. Indeed, understanding the air through our senses and experiences is not a practice isolated to the 19th century. Timothy Choy describes in his ethnography on contemporary environmentalism in Hong Kong how his interlocutors first and foremost speak of air in terms of feelings, experiences, and health, illustrating the centrality of the body in assessing air: foul air  smells, gives headaches, and irritates lungs. Air also carries other smells: of flowers, sea, autumn, and of afternoon tea in one’s favourite chair – perhaps comforting and healing properties in themselves.⁵ But in the Anthropocene, the body is a site where the terraforming of our environments by different means, including the employment of technological innovations, is manifested and negotiated.⁶ And in regard to air, digitally and technologically mediated experiences of air increasingly mix with our bodily perceptions. Simultaneously, this also shapes our conceptions of the environment. 

Digitally mediated airscapes

As we are encountering numerical, comparable, commodified, and artificially constructed air, it is not a surprise that our relation to nature has been described as increasingly mediated through digital technologies, influencing our perceptions of the environment and, by extension, our airscapes.⁷  Research of people’s interaction with AQI-apps in the US and China illustrates how the numbers and the bodily experiences sometimes diverge: the AQI-value proclaims decent air quality, but bodily reactions to the air indicate otherwise, creating confusion around what one experiences.⁸ This prompts the question of how one combines and makes sense of bodily sensations and the information of AQI-apps?

The increasingly popular AQI-apps construct airscapes based on air quality scores (AQI-values), and not bodily sensations. Measured levels of nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, PM2.5 and PM10 generate a particular idea of air as constructed of mainly four gases and two particles deemed adverse to human health⁹. A specific understanding of air is manifest already in the chosen measured components; air is stripped of smell, sound, breeze, humidity, feelings, and of other scientific gases such as oxygen or carbon dioxide. Furthermore, the AQI-apps rank the best/worst air in the world, blending and connecting geographical areas, or sometimes separating them, based on the AQI-values of different locations. Some days, places like Beijing, New Delhi, Cairo, and Sarajevo share a common airscape, regardless of geographical boundaries, smells, breeze, or memories. Other days, neighbouring cities couldn’t be placed further apart, creating a sense among AQI-app users of air as comparable – a  competitive gaming entity.¹⁰

As digital and artificially produced airscapes increasingly influence our experiences of air, how we live, feel, and create our airscapes emerge as central issues to explore. What kind of airscapes do we inhabit? Who gets to breathe what kind of air, and how is it constructed, simulated, and understood? Instead of succumbing to the dreariness of simulated sea air or caged air domes in lieu of the real air, the notion of airscapes provides a viewpoint from which we can critically ask who gets to breathe and inhabit a certain air and take measures to change the situation. Moreover, while toxins nowadays dominate narratives of air, Emma and Choy’s interlocutors remind us that air is composed of different atmospheric experiences and entities – smells, breeze, memories, power, feelings, and sounds. The multitude of contemporary airscapes can act as sites from which we learn and understand – the broken, the hopeful, the hidden, and not least, our more-than-human relationships. 

Works cited

1. Hay, W. D.  The Doom of the Great City. 2025 (1880) West Virginia University Press. ↩︎
2. Austen, J. Emma. London: Penguin Classics, 2009 (1816) p.129. ↩︎
3. Ritchie, H. “What the history of London’s air pollution can tell us about the future of today’s growing megacities”. 2017. https://ourworldindata.org/london-air-pollution ↩︎
4. Li, Y. “Dome sweet dome.” 2014 https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/848220.shtml2014 ↩︎
5. Choy, T. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. ↩︎
6. Fjalland, E. Terraforming. In Krogh, S. (Ed.) Connectedness: an incomplete encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. Strandberg Publishing, Copenhagen. 2020, pp. 360-363. ↩︎
7. Goldstein, J., & Nost, E. The nature of data: infrastructures, environments, politics. University of Nebraska Press, 2022. ↩︎
8. Graminius C., & Haider J. (preprint) Anticipating airpocalypse: air quality apps and implicit modes of anticipatory practices. Futures. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4952462 ↩︎
9. Graminius C., & Haider, J. (2018). Air pollution online: Everyday environmental information on the social media site Sina Weibo. Journal of Documentation. 74(4), pp.722-740.
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10. Ibid. ↩︎

About the author:
Carin Graminius is a researcher in environmental communication who received her PhD in Information Studies from Lund University, Sweden, in 2023. Her interdisciplinary research spans the fields of environmental humanities, cultural studies, environmental communication, and sinology, with a particular focus on eco-aesthetics, climate fiction, affect, and practices of anticipation and datafication.

Tagged airscapes, Anthropocene, Climate Change, digital, Extractivism, Nature Writing, pollution