"We still have much to learn from our elders, about the past and about the future we hope to build"

Tomás Sánchez Criado, an expert in care transformations in urban contexts relating to accessibility, extreme heat and population ageing, is a Ramón y Cajal researcher, with a Leonardo Grant, in the CareNet group of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). In this conversation, he reviews the main challenges posed by two closely related issues, climate change and population ageing, from a domestic and an international perspective, and also comments on one of the many activities in which he has recently participated to help make this world a more habitable place: a workshop on "La ciutat de les ombres" (The City of Shadows), as part of Barcelona's Architecture Weeks.

For several summers now, we've been temperature records being broken and suffering constant heat waves. From your scientific discipline, what can we do to combat climate change and extreme heat in particular?

As a social scientist and urban anthropologist, I'm interested in two issues regarding extreme heat as an expression of climate change: the historical dimension and the inequalities it leads to, at a time when more and more people live in urban environments.

Regarding the first issue, we can't separate the use of fossil fuels from what we do. They are core to our way of life, but at the same time their emissions generate the greatest environmental impact on the planet, in the form of extreme and increasing heat. In the field of social sciences, the term Anthropocene has come to be widely accepted; rather than referring to a geological era, it highlights the historical impact that human beings are having on the planet. Although perhaps it would be more accurate to talk about capitalism, rather than attributing blame to humanity as a whole.

The second issue that interests me is that of inequality, because extreme heat does not affect everyone in the same way. The people most affected are those who are in situations of social exclusion or poverty: the elderly, children, people who work outdoors, people who live in energy poverty in poor quality housing or who cannot use air conditioning.

What's more important in combating climate change: the role of leaders or that of ordinary citizens?

The truth is that we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. The philosopher Bruno Latour speaks of "climate mutation" and describes the challenge we face as "founding a new climate regime." We're in times of great uncertainty, and there's no doubt that we must take action regarding this matter, because, despite its complexity, it's a phenomenon that has to do with our practices, with our general activity.

We need public policies, of course, but the truth is that the government cannot reach everywhere, nor can it do so quickly enough. You could say that the present moment is similar to the time immediately after World War II, when everything changed completely in just five years: social states as we know them today were created, transport and communication infrastructures were founded, etc.

For this to be possible, everyone has a part to play. Public policies are necessary, but I think that governing bodies should move away from the technocratic desire to direct everything, and leave much more scope for citizen collaboration and intervention. Without this participation, and in a certain sense activism, it will be difficult to deal democratically with the tragic circumstances in which we live.

Where does Spain stand in this regard compared to other European countries? And Europe in relation to other continents?

The question is complex, because there are different indicators and many unequal effects, but, due to its geographical location, its low-quality housing stock and many people living in energy poverty, Spain may be one of the European countries most affected by increasing extreme heat.

Although much more extreme temperatures are experienced in other parts of the world, from which we have much to learn, attention is focusing on the effects of urban heat islands and increasingly frequent heat waves: heat strokes and what to do when minimum temperatures so high they don't allow a good night's rest. To deal with this, in addition to increasing the number of trees, innovative measures such as climate shelters, bioclimatic routes and shade infrastructure are being introduced.

Europe and Spain are doing a tremendous job of measuring and intervening. Other parts of the world do not have the conditions for this, but there seems to be a broad consensus that the Global South will definitely suffer much more from the consequences of extreme heat.

What conclusions did you reach in your City of Shadows workshop?

"The City of Shadows" is part of a collaboration agreement that the UOC has signed with the Office for Climate Change and Sustainability and Barcelona City Council's BIT Habitat Foundation. The Barcelona Climate Action Plan, which is quite ambitious, includes a shade plan. They've been analysing the city's exposure to the sun. The City Council's main idea is that the best possible way to keep cool is the shade of a tree, but in places where trees cannot be planted, temporary shade structures are being considered. These Council departments have launched a competition to encourage people to submit prototypes of solutions that are not on the market.

My role in it is to carry out a study of the prototyping and implementation processes and the next step, which will be to transform these prototypes into working specifications for the City Council, that is, to write the specifications so that the City Council can publish calls for this type of project and include it in its catalogue of services. In this context, I set up a workshop called "The City of Shadows", the aim of which was to expand how we think about the social and urban role of shade, creating a fictitious "Department of Umbrology" for this purpose. We tried to consider what it would mean in practical terms to build and live in cities from the viewpoint of shade, something rooted in traditional Mediterranean architecture, but forgotten by modern urban planning. Shade has an undeniable poetic and popular dimension, but it also allows us to address an elusive subject like heat as something we can rework collectively, with our hands.

In your work you're interested in the relationship between this and population ageing. What are its main effects? And what can we do to combat them?

In the most industrialized countries, more and more people are living longer. This should be a cause for celebration because it's an unprecedented situation, but it's seen by certain experts as a "grey tsunami", a looming catastrophe that will cause a crisis in the Social Security budget (the costs of long-term care will be ever higher, etc.). Moreover, all this is happening at a time of climate change, with heat being one of the main challenges for the care of the elderly, especially those who are isolated or lonely. Indeed, mortality attributable to heat waves tends to severely impact the elderly population.

European states have worked hard to create better living conditions for older people through social benefits or – and Spain is a pioneer in this – through technological infrastructure and accessible mobility: low-floor buses, bathroom renovations, accessible pavements, social networks to combat loneliness. But in this concatenation of unprecedented crises, the perfect storm, today's adults do not know if we will be able to grow old in the same conditions as our parents, because in many cases we haven't had access to home ownership or stable employment. We're sure to be poorer. This is a new situation, because the fact that there are many older people living well, which is initially a positive achievement, becomes a problem if it is viewed from the perspective of the welfare state in times of climate change.

So how do you view the future? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

Reflection on the future dimension of these mainly urban infrastructures for the care of the elderly is one of the central threads of a project that I'm going to start work on now: "Ageing cities. The future of urban planning for older people on the Spanish coast", funded by the BBVA Foundation. Despite this great cultural change, we still encounter many types of ageism. Older people are seen as a burden and young people are spoken of as the future.

But why don't we change our approach and think about the future of those cities made to grow old in from the viewpoint of the elderly, and not just the young? For example, one of the major climate lawsuits in Europe in recent years came from the Swiss Association of Older Women for Climate, which took the Swiss state to the European Court of Human Rights, forcing it to remedy its intergenerational neglect of climate policy, arguing that heat waves have a severe effect on older people. So, we still have much to learn from our elders, not only about the past, but also about the futures that they could help us build.

 

UOC R&I

The UOC's research and innovation (R&I) is helping overcome pressing challenges faced by global societies in the 21st century by studying interactions between technology and human & social sciences with a specific focus on the network society, e-learning and e-health.

Over 500 researchers and more than 50 research groups work in the UOC's seven faculties, its eLearning Research programme and its two research centres: the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the eHealth Center (eHC).

The university also develops online learning innovations at its eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC), as well as UOC community entrepreneurship and knowledge transfer via the Hubbik platform.

Open knowledge and the goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development serve as strategic pillars for the UOC's teaching, research and innovation. More information: research.uoc.edu.