ATMOSPHERIC APPARITIONS: Particle Pollutants – Dust, Ash, Smog and Smoke
“ATMOSPHERIC APPARITIONS” brings together interdisciplinary perspectives in the disciplines of Geography and Architecture to examine convergences in scholarship on atmospheric politics.
This reading list interrogates the uneven impacts of particle pollutants on space, place and differential bodies in the context of (but not limited to) wildfires, haze, dust storms, and infrastructural residues. The list attends to scholarship on the complexities of “volumetric,” the “elemental” and the “(im)material” to study particulates pollutants’ circulation and rootedness in regimes of colonialism, capitalism, militarism, and extractivism.
This is a collaborative list authored by Alina Debyser, Matthew Phan and Desiree Valadares as an accompaniment to an on-campus exhibition we are curating at the University of British Columbia on view July-September 2025 at the Liu Lobby Gallery.
The list is divided into 3 main sections and features paired or companion readings. Our goal is to curate a conversation among scholars in Geography and Architecture, Landscape and Preservation, alongside visual artists, whose works are typically read or studied in separate disciplines.
Our list is organized as follows:
- Particulate Encounters
- Atmospheric Politics
- Air and the Volumetric
"Dust: Perfect Circularity."
Cultural Geographies 25, no. 3 (2017), 501-507.
Nieuwenhuis and Nassar draw from the exhibition A Handful of Dust, curated by David Campany, to suggest how dust may expand certain understandings in political and cultural geography through its fragmentary, indeterminate, and circular properties. Dust pushes us to think more about scale, as dust occupies both the minute and the expansive, both close and distant; its ephemerality and capacity to infiltrate and damage makes us question false conceptions of stability and solidity of modern infrastructure, territory, and other geographical interests; and its mobility and transgressions encourage us to think about the movement of materials and bodies in space.
-Authored by Alina Debyser
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPANION READINGS (in Landscape Architecture):
Cooper, Danika. "How to Draw a Dust Storm." Journal of Landscape Architecture (Wageningen, Netherlands), vol. 14, no. 2, 2019, pp. 36-41.
Cooper, Danika. "Dry Matters: Speculations for an Arid Future." Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 77, no. 2, 2023, pp. 410-426.
Cooper (2019) contends with circularity in the visualization of dust storms. She frames these as creators of "new micro-topographies" and argues that designers must move beyond pointillism as a representational technique. In her design studies of dust plumes, along a highway corridor between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, she uses "seriality" or a filmic approach to map "the evolving intensity" of a dust storm through creative mapping, photo collage, and charcoal drawings. In a more recent piece, Cooper (2023) centers dust, aridity, and drylands in her landscape design studios to draw attention to ecologically-sensitive design responses to water scarcity. She employs "dry matters" as a thematic and pedagogical framing for reimagining new dryland futurities through a "new material palette" that contends with the circulation and re-circulation of dust.
-Authored by Desiree Valadares
"An Ash Cloud, Airspace and Environmental Threat"
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, no. 3 (2011), 338-343.
Adey et al. articulate the disruptions of ash clouds on European airspace following the the 2010 Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruptions that temporarily shut down air travel into and out of northwestern Europe. Adey et al. consider how ash implicated international relations, regional security and risk, and mobilities. They argue that the Icelandic ash cloud event is defined as an important marker in elemental geopolitics, with the transgression of the ash cloud over geopolitical borders confronting mechanisms and organization of European airspace governance, sovereignty, and collaboration.
-Authored by Alina Debyser
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------COMPANION ARTWORK
Tomás Saraceno. We do not all breathe the same air 2018–ongoing
Air pollution prints; black carbon, soot, PM2.5 filter paper.
https://studiotomassaraceno.org/we-do-not-all-breathe-the-same-air/This artwork visualizes particulate matter through a series of spherical orbs in shades of grey to show the uneven distribution of air quality. Argentine artist Saraceno uses a Beta Attenuation Mass Monitor (BAM), a machine commonly used by state agencies, to measure particulate matter over time. He blends scientific inquiry with data visualization and visual art to record information cities around the world at various scales (urban, suburban, rural) and at varied heights and depths. The BAM was one among many other air monitoring devices used in the aftermath of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption to monitor ground and airborne levels of fine particulate matter and ash.
-Authored by Desiree Valadares
"Toxic Landfills, Survivor Trees, and Dust Cloud Memories: More-Than-Human Ecologies of 9/11 Memory."
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37, no. 3 (2019), 504-522.
This paper by geographers Micieli-Voutsinas and Cavicchi centers on 9/11 and the more-than-human, where dust clouds were a pervasive remnant of the rubble and a symbol of loss. Toxins from the WTC collapse also dispersed in toxic dust clouds, converging the boundary between environment and body and creating patterns of exposure along lines of race, class, and gender. The authors follow the cleanup process of the 9/11 aftermath, where governments held the faulty notion that the toxicity and dust could be effectively contained and failed to consider certain toxic dust pollutants and its “slow violence” on people. The dust also entangled itself with commemoration, being used as material replacements for bodily remains in urns, exemplifying how dust can become part of memorial and trauma geographies.
-Authored by Alina Debyser
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPANION READING (in Landscape/Urban Studies/Geography):
Arbona, Javier. Explosivity: Following What Remains. University of Minessota Press. 2025.
Arbona, an architect-geographer, centers five major explosions in the Bay Area between 1866 and 2011, including a site of national trauma - the Port Chicago Disaster, a deadly munitions explosion in 1944. As a "critical activation of the senses" this book focuses on everyday racialized exposure and offers a call to practice a "radical remembering of what remains." Framing California's San Francisco Bay Area as "the city of explosivity," Arbona's study traces or follows remains by combining oral history, ethnography, archival research with on-site landscape traverses to connect seemingly disparate stories of 19th century Chinese migrant explosive workers, World War II Black munition loaders and 2000s science entertainment TV series MythBusters's experimental explosions. Arbona's collage-like approach weaves a narrative that challenges the reader to think critically of remains and residues and importantly, opens up broader questions about the pervasiveness of military technology, the security state and toxic exposures in urban space.
-Authored by Desiree Valadares
"On Sovereignty, Deficits, and Dump Fires: Risk Governance in an Arctic “Dumpcano”
In Inevitably Toxic: Historical Perspectives on Contamination, Exposure, and Expertise, 259-283. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.
Zahara examines the toxic smoke and sovereignty impacts surrounding a dump fire (known colloquially as a “dumpcano”) in Nunavut’s capital of Iqaluit, foregrounding problems of delocalization of risk management strategies based only on Western scientific knowledge by government officials. In contrast, community resistance grounded in Inuit knowledge contextualized the smoke and dump fire hazard as not an isolated event but one arising from colonialism, Inuit histories of contamination and inequity, and structural barriers to health. This is particularly notable due to the often overlooked geographic focus on smoke in a northern Canadian Arctic environment, also intersecting with Indigenous knowledge and resistance.
-Authored by Alina Debyser
“Floating in Space: Teaching Atmosphere in Human Geography”
Journal of Geography in Higher Education 48 (2): 245-265.
This piece reflects on the "atmospheric turn" in Human Geography and how to teach students to think and feel through atmospheres. Engelmann reflects on an outdoor floating workshop she leads for her undergraduate students at Royal Halloway University of London and draws on the practices of artistic communities like Aerocene to produce a form of artful, situated learning in which students engage with multimedia sculpture and floating as a sensual and affective process. Students design and fly solar-powered, wind-driven balloons to reflect on design-thinking in turbulent space, how to capture sensory and meteorological data, and how to study the entanglement of human and artificial bodies in atmospheric flows, specifically as community practices. Ultimately, Engelmann calls for artful approaches to teaching the atmosphere that, like atmospheric space, are capacious in their linking of creativity, design, data, materiality, and sense.
-Authored by Matthew Phan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPANION READINGS (in Architecture)
Negar Goljan. "Revisiting Atmosphere in Architecture" 2020. Places Journal. [Available] https://placesjournal.org/workshop-article/revisiting-atmosphere-in-architecture/
Authored at the height of COVID-19, Goljan's short article advocates for a serious consideration of air and atmospheres in the discipline of architecture, beyond empty space or the void. She argues that air must also be conceptualized beyond "simply a germ-free, comfortable medium" as promoted by modernist architects and studies in the building sciences on thermal comfort, and climactic control. Instead, Goljan reminds readers of spiritual, affective and multi-sensorial approaches of designing with air by architects such as Marina Tabassum, Studio Fuksas, Samira Rathod Design Atelier among others whose buildings in Bangladesh, Italy and India are both practical and artful, in that they display a sensitivity to atmospheric elements - air, light, and acoustics.
-Authored by Desiree Valadares
“Lures of Imagination: D-OAEC Aerocene.”
In Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices, 114–140. Routledge, 2020.
Engelmann reflects on the D-OAEC Aerocene sculpture, a solar aerostat, as an experimental, aerosolar art that provokes "lures of imagination," or the ability to imagine, sense, and feel the world differently. Practices involving these lures negotiate new relationships, material and imagined, between bodies and atmospheric phenomena, specifically clouds and solar light. Through visual analysis and historiography, Engelmann traces a fascination with cloud and light physics in Eurowestern science that produces a form of what Gayatri Spivak terms planetarity, or "the de-familiarization of familiar space" through atmospheric encounters. Therefore, thinking through the elemental lures of clouds and solar light calibrates new apparitions and cognitive classification schemas that refigure planetary imaginaries of incongruity and alterity into responsible engagements with different environments and peoples.
-Authored by Matthew Phan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPANION READINGS (in Architecture)Simbürger, Wiltrud. "Utopia's Bubbles: Pneumatic Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s as a Vehicle for Urban Exhibitionism." Architecture and Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, 2015, pp. 159-173.
Simbürger contends with "captive air" through his study of inhabitable pneumatic architecture. Building on cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk's concept of "explication" and the treatment of airspace in his book Terror from the Air (2002), Simbürger argues for a new consideration of air. He asks: "Why was the pneumatic bubble so popular for this short period [1960-1970]? Why was it chosen as the fitting aesthetic companion to the social and political utopias of the era?" Using Mind Expander, Restless Sphere, and Oasis No. 7 as examples, Simbürger argues that these spherical utopias forge a "parasitical existence" that rely on an impermeable membrane or envelope to hold captive air, differentiating it from "other airs." Ultimately, this piece interrogates the visual politics of pneumatics and theorizes the bubble as an architectural form that "instrumentalizes air."
-Authored by Desiree Valadares
“Towards a Sensory Politics of the Anthropocene: Exploring Activist-Artistic Approaches to Politicizing Air Pollution.”
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 40, no. 3 (May 2022): 629–47.
In locating air pollution in the experientiality of activist-art, Landau and Toland resist staging air pollution as merely a policy issue, instead calling for sensorial approaches that reframe political knowledge as open, democratized, diverse, and open to speculation. Landau and Toland compare five projects on air pollution from around the world to interrogate the ways in which air problematizes commonality through environmental inequality and how air's interscalarity necessarily engages with different modes of political participation and affect. The authors situate their discussion in broader discourses on the Anthropocene and using the sensorial to re-order, re-distribute, and re-articulate air pollution in terms of sensorial experiences that de-universalize and de-mystify global climate inequalities, with the goal of producing a future environmental justice by politicizing current atmospheres.
-Authored by Matthew Phan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPANION READINGS (in Architecture):Calvillo, Nerea. "Political Airs: From Monitoring to Attuned Sensing Air Pollution." Social Studies of Science, vol. 48, no. 3, 2018, pp. 372-388.
Calvillo, Nerea. "Atmospheric Infrastructures to Deal with the Toxic Air in a Common World." Ardeth (Print), vol. 5, 2019, pp. 184-197.
Calvillo, Nerea. Aeropolis. Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, New York, 2023, 285
Calvillo's writing challenges architects' relationship with air and the atmosphere. In her 2018 article, she studies Madrid's air through sensors, emission reports, citizen organizations, urban masterplans to develop an analytic frame that Calvillo terms "aeropolis." Combining feminist and queer theory, technoscience studies and new materialism, Calvillo reframes air/atmospheres as infrastructure (2019) or as "aerial socio-technical assemblages." Her 2023 book, calls to “de-in-visibilize air” and take seriously the "vaporous and troubling spaces, physical and imaginary," in buildings and urban environments. Her reading of air through queer ecology offers new a sensibility that promotes what she terms a "collective sensing."
-Authored by Desiree Valadares
“A Political Ecology of Atmospheres: A Voluminous Case Study of the Guiana Shield”
Political Geography 109 (March 2024).
Drawing on fieldwork from the forests of the Guiana Shield, Collins extends the field of political ecology through conceptualizing the atmosphere. Collins selects weathering as a methodological approach that attends to the slow biogeochemical and socio-political processes that configure South America's colonial history. In doing so, Collins engages with voluminous space and particulate matter in the atmosphere as an archive of the region's territorialized political ecology, using weathering to connect human activities like mining to non-human atmospheric processes that respond and capture these extractive histories. The paper concludes by reminding how power relations and racialized social climates are entangled in the atmosphere's circulations, slowness, and sometimes sudden violences that have multi-scalar effects that traverse specific origin points.
-Authored by Matthew Phan
“Volume.”
In Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment, 101–120. Duke University Press, 2018
This chapter theorizes volume against the liability for atmospheres to be rendered in precise and unambiguous terms of containment and calculation. To this end, McCormack reviews examples of installation art to demonstrate the gaseous and affective senses of atmosphere that are both recognized and made incalculable—both engineered and experienced. McCormack highlights envelopment as a process of multi-sensorial spatialization that accounts for atmospheric spaces as constructed yet fragile, felt yet often invisible, surrounding yet open. Rather than statically volumetric, voluminous atmospheres exceed geometric certainties by moving "across and between bodies and their moving relations"; atmospheres are constantly emergent and changing, which can be formally accounted for as/through volume's vagueness. Atmospheres, then, are apparitional in their relational and fragile existences in which space is felt rather than strictly perceived or measured.
-Authored by Matthew Phan
“Historical Geographies of the Future: Airships and the Making of Imperial Atmospheres”
Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109, no. 4 (July 4, 2019): 1279–99.
This article discusses the elemental-material and imaginative geographies of interwar airship travel in the British Empire. Mahony approaches the airship as a colonial technology of imagination, expectation, and prediction that signaled the colonization of global airspace through the attempted conveyance of bodies, militarized technology, and power to the outer reaches of the British empire. Mahony turns to atmospheric space as a space of expectation in historical futurisms through which sociotechnical innovations and imaginaries produced visions of aerial mobility, imperial certainty, and atmospheric stability. A focus on imagination, expectation, and prediction provokes contemporary science and technology studies as a framework for studying historical geographies and atmospheric knowledge-making as anticipatory and imbued with speculative dispositions.
-Authored by Matthew Phan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPANION READINGS (In Architecture)Nesbit, Jeffrey S. Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA's Space Complex. Routledge, Oxford, 2024.
Nesbit studies the U.S. space complex from 1950-1969 centering NASA’s primary human spaceflight facilities, proving grounds, aeronautical labs, and research centres. Nesbit characterizes these vast landscapes and infrastructures as "technical lands." Ground Control (2024) builds on a previous edited volume Technical Lands: A Critical Primer (JOVIS, 2023) co-authored with Charles Waldheim to show how sites' exceptional status, hidden locations, and delineated boundaries obscure architectural study. Nesbit study of NASA's on-ground infrastructures and land-use practices, reveals broader techno-military entanglements, Cold War politics, and shows how U.S. attitudes about space exploration fundamentally influenced the design and management of land-based research and testing facilities.
-Authored by Desiree Valadares
"Postcolonial Atmospheres: Air’s Coloniality and the Climate of Enclosure."
Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111, no. 5 (2020), 1483-1502.
In this article, Ghertner engages with postcolonial atmospherics to contextualize and rethink Delhi’s ‘airpocalypse’ and other instances of air pollution in India. He highlights today’s escapist climate of enclosure that prioritizes enclosing bodies in clean air environments over trying to reduce air pollution emissions. Ghertner further discusses colonial epistemologies characterizing air in the Global South tropics as inherently unclean, which are echoed in governance on air pollution today. He offers a postcolonial framing to move beyond Western accounts and theories of air and atmosphere, and interrogating how atmospheres can perpetuate othering.
-Authored by Alina Debyser
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPANION READINGS (in Architecture)Gissen, David. "Reading Hollywood in the Smog." Harvard Design Magazine, no. 40, 2015, pp. 69-69.
Gissen, David. "Exhaust and Territorialisation at the Washington Bridge Apartments, New York City, 1963-1973." Journal of Architecture (London, England), vol. 21, no. 5, 2016, pp. 734-746.
Gissen (2015) studies air pollution through LA smog in his purposeful (mis)reading of the iconic 1923 Hollywood sign at a distance. He shows, through the sign's distortion and illegibility, how ozone, hydrocarbons and chemical haze obscure, make illegible, and disappear landmarks and representational forms of city. In an earlier piece, Gissen (2007) studies the four buildings of the Washington Bridge Apartments (built between 1961-1964), part of the Trans-Manhattan Expressway in Washington Heights, New York. He uses territorialization to show how enclosure, air rights schemes, highways and automobile pollution converge at the apartments to offer the false promise of protection or an "enclave from pollution" for its working class residents.
-Authored by Desiree Valadares
"When the Vertical Becomes Horizontal: Experiencing Exploding Mountains in Borderlands."
Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110, no. 4 (2019), 1040-1058.
As a prominent scholar in the area of volcanic geopolitics, Donovan draws attention to the liminality of volcanoes that lie on borders, particularly important for considering the transboundary capability of ash movement. She uses the example of Chilean Volcan Puyehue whose ash plume extended into Argentina to illustrate various particular economic, social, and health impacts of ashfall. She also elaborates on the governance and knowledge flows in responding to cross-border volcanic ash, weaving this into the history and politics between the two countries. This is a unique paper due to its concern with the geographically liminal, vertical and volumetric, territory and borders, and strong recognition of the materialities of ash.
-Authored by Alina Debyser
"Critical Physical Geographies of Air, Atmosphere, and Climate.”
Progress in Environmental Geography. 2023. 2 (4): 225-239.
Colucci et al. outline an agenda for physical geographers to take up air/atmospheric space in closer coordination with critical traditions of human geography, focusing on co-production of diverse knowledges and disciplinary porosity in attending to air/atmosphere from a justice-based perspective. Importantly, physical geographers are equipped to understand the materiality of air in terms of molecular absorption, energy dispersal, and particulate cycle. The authors pair a focus on the materiality of air with a specific emphasis on climatic thermal inequities and the materially uneven effects of labor policy, flooding, wildfires, and incarceration on marginalized communities. The cross-cutting work proposed in the paper calls for a multifaceted approach to social-environmental relationships in response to changing atmospheres around the world.
-Authored by Matthew Phan
"Fugitive Dust: The Indeterminate Trajectories of Urban Development’s Present Past."
Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113, no. 4 (2022), 857-872.
Presenting an urban studies approach to the geographies of dust, Noterman looks at toxic histories of construction dust in postindustrial Philadelphia. The paper interrogates the indeterminacy and fugitivity of toxic dust as it moves across spatial and temporal boundaries, and examines how these qualities and embedded pasts position dust as a threatening and harmful substance. Noterman understands fugitivity from an environmental air quality perspective, as particles that escape into and are suspended in the air, outside of a specific flow stream. Fugitive dust carries a certain unpredictability in dispersal, has no concern for physical or imagined boundaries, and is often vast and difficult to see.
-Authored by Alina Debyser
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPANION READINGS (In Landscape Architecture)Hutton, Jane. "Reciprocal Landscapes: Material Portraits in New York City and Elsewhere." Journal of Landscape Architecture (Wageningen, Netherlands), vol. 8, no. 1, 2013, pp. 40-47.
Hutton, Jane E., and Taylor & Francis eBooks EBA. Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories in Material Movement. Routledge, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY; 2019
Hutton (2013; 2019) contends with fugitivity and movement through her framing of the reciprocal nature and mutual exchange of landscapes. She contends with Guano, steel, granite, plane tree and tropical wood and their global circulations or "material movements" prior to their use in New York public spaces between 1860 and 2009. Hutton's use of stories capture the "unequal ecological exchange" of labour and extraction to show how, for example, guano from Peru landed in Central Park or ipe, a tropical hardwood from northern Brazil was installed on the High Line in the 2000s. These material movements (of guano dust) show how new value is ascribed in designed landscapes that recast these materials and plant life as local.
-Authored by Desiree Valadares