Margherita Tess and Santiago Orrego prepared this issue. Zeynep S. Akinci curated it, and Santiago edited and designed it.
We close our trilogy on urban shadows by presenting a collaborative number on umbrellas, parasols, canopies, and other personal devices producing minimal shade. The issue has the Japanese city of Fukuoka as its primary site for exploration and Medellín, Colombia, as a location to essay a quick ethnographic exercise using some of the prototypes proposed in Tarde´s numbers 6 and 8.
Content
Fukuoka
How are unshaded spaces lived and traversed in cities at the forefront of urban heating? Southern Japan has a famously torrid climate and infamous statistics regarding dwelling in the summer period. This piece, based on ongoing ethnographical research, explores cultures of shading while moving or standing in sun-drenched grey spaces of Japanese urbanity, especially using umbrellas.
Umbrellas as part of the urbanscape
In the hot summer of 2023, I did fieldwork in Fukuoka in southern Japan. In early June, when high temperatures were hitting for the first time in the year, and later in August, when the temperature would not get down to 35 or 37 °C for several days, a daily concern for citizens was the risk of heat stroke, or in Japanese necchusho, the illness of inner heat. Heat sickness, sunstroke, or heatstroke, simply put, arises when the body is not able to regulate its temperature anymore and overheats, causing medical complications if untreated.
During an interview, an epistemic partner in his seventies told me about his experience traversing too hot urban spaces: “I got a heat stroke on Shoninbashi Street in Chuo-ku, Fukuoka City. It was the first time. If I had 30 minutes, I would have gone into a coffee shop to take a break, but I had 10 minutes until the designated time. It was 2:00 p.m. on August 4, and the asphalt road was much more sun-drenched than I had imagined. There were no benches or shade trees to sit and rest. I felt like I was the main character in Albert Camus’ “L’étranger.” I searched for a place where I could rest my body.”In the context of an unlivable outdoors, made of Camusian-like scorching sun, shading things articulate urban relationships between bodies and the sun, creating portions of space with better climatic conditions. Shading things in increased hot summers mediates our sensorial experience of the city spaces and contributes to keeping bodies in safe conditions. As much as other cities in Japan, Fukuoka inherited what Tomás Criado called Solar Urbanism [1]. Streets often constitute urban spaces, and paths are intended more for air-conditioned cars than walking bodies. In this number, I want to focus on one specific minimal shade: the one of parasols. As Japanese cities overheat, several of my informants rely on umbrellas to maintain their body temperature at a lower state. A shading umbrella, I was told, is a must to avoid heat stroke.
Umbrella, from the Latin umbraculum, literally means small shade. Although umbrellas are most commonly associated with rain nowadays, they carry the original purpose of shading in the name. Today’s higasa (日傘), Japanese parasols, differ from rain umbrellas regarding materials. Although sometimes used interchangeably with rain ones, currently manufactured parasols are specialized in blocking heat and ultraviolet (UV) rays. UV umbrellas include a special coating on the fabric surface made of titanium dioxide, zinc dioxide, or other similar compounds, sometimes black to absorb ultraviolet rays, and sometimes silver designed to reflect UV radiation instead of absorbing it. A quick Google search in Japanese would show thousands of products with different levels of UV absorption and various promises of feeling cooler, protected, and safe. Hundreds of ads show very fair-skinned people looking relieved under pastel color umbrellas.
Umbrellas, as shading devices, have a long history. They seem to have existed in Japan since the Kofun period, and during the Heian period, were made of varnished paper and used interchangeably against the sun and rain. However, they were the prerogative of the high classes, while lower-class members would wear conical hats. During Kamakura and later the Edo period, they became popular also among Samurai and monks. As portrayed in many wood-print images, umbrellas were part and parcels of the Edo cityscape [2].
The so-called Western umbrellas (yougasa), as opposed to the paper umbrellas (wagasa), were seen for the first time when Commodore Perry arrived in Japan. The yougasa became known in Japan as bat umbrellas (koumorikasa), probably because of their black color and the cloth-made flappy wedges. The bat umbrella rapidly supplanted the Japanese varnished paper one, becoming a symbol of urban Western modernity and refined style.
Today, bat umbrellas might no longer symbolize Western modernity as they did during the Meiji Restoration. However, they remain an essential part of the summer urban landscape and continue to mediate meanings related to class, race, and urban culture. As scholar Mikiko Ashikari underscores, cultivating a white complexion through skin shading is associated with the urban middle class and mediates colonial ideas of Japaneseness [4]. However, as hazardous levels of heat and UV radiation preoccupy citizens, parasols now also mediate ideas of safety against a dangerous, unshaded environment that threatens not only the skin but also the body’s healthy thermal regulation. In this piece, I would like to focus on these more recent and under-theorized developments of cultures of shading, meaning the sheltering effect from urban overheating driven by climate change. Borrowing the terms from the previous Tarde issue, I am more interested in umbrella shades as “existential territories of life”, which shelter bodies against a hazardous thermal environment. Heat stroke risk and the fear of suffering from it in public are driving people to use parasols increasingly. Pedestrian crossings, rarely shaded, are traversed by thousands of portable shades, portions of cool microclimates under which human bodies move across solar-centric landscapes. How can this monadic umbracula be conceptualized concerning an overheated urbanity?
Umbrellas and minimal urban spaces
In Fukuoka, as well as other cities in Japan, street trees are a rare luxury. Space in dense cities is precious and expensive, and footpaths are often thin and unshaded. As landscape architects have told me many times, street trees pose a real issue, as they can obstruct drivers’ view, and their fallen leaves and fruit annoy pedestrians and car owners. Often, for several reasons, including a low budget for urban greenery maintenance and the perception of trees as a nuisance, street trees are heavily pruned and look more like light poles, depriving them of their shading function [5]. In this context, minor shading things and devices, such as parasols, create minimal shaded spaces where trees or buildings are unavailable sources of shade. Modern infrastructure and construction that mark the landscape traversed by human and other animal bodies inherit and are still marked by development-centric approaches, where the habitability of the outdoors has receded into the background. Infrastructures and buildings, though, do shade or light as a by-product, allowing for unintentionally shaded spaces, such as under an elevated highway [6]. However, as the thermal environment of Japanese cities becomes increasingly overheated, are these shaded byproducts enough? How do citizens negotiate their comfort and safety for the solar design of their urban environment?
Shades in the context of climate change can be fruitfully explored as ¨lived regions,¨ephemeral but delimited spaces [7]. Although shade appears bidimensional when cast on a flat surface, umbrella shade must be understood as a volumetric region, as it creates a tridimensional region of cooler microclimate. A common UV-cut parasol allows for a small portable portion of altered climate: a specific fabric mesh protects the body from ultraviolet rays (responsible for skin damage), and a reflecting or absorbing fabric decreases the temperature, blocking sun radiations’ warming energy. The umbrella poses as a mediator between the sun and the body and is part of a material culture of climatic adaptation. However, the umbrella could also be seen as a spacing device that creates minimal units of inhabitable urban space. If we focus on the space under the umbrella, we can see that it has been critical. Rulers, or gods and spirits in Japanese religiosities, can appear under umbrellas [8]. Not only do gods and rulers exist under the umbrella’s protection, but during rituals or matsuri (shrine festivals), this protected space becomes traversable by lay people. At the Yasurai Festival at Imamiya shrine, worshippers enter under the umbrella to eliminate diseases. Always linked to some form of protection, in some contexts, the space under the umbrella becomes a territory different from the surroundings because of its sacrality; in the current climatic crisis, this shaded portion of space creates a region of microclimatic specificity, differentiating it from a hazardous environment. In other words, the space created by the umbrella, although temporary, elusive, and without clear borders, has been an important and under-theorized urban space.
Designing intentionally small shades
In 2021, the Japanese Ministry of Environment published the Climate Change Adaptation Plan. In the section concerning urban spaces, the following scenarios are portrayed: the risk of heatstroke in Tokyo is predicted to increase 2.4 times in the 2050s and, in the 2090s, the time during the day when people can work outdoors in Tokyo and Osaka will be 30 to 40% shorter than at present, and the number of days when it is unsafe to work outdoors will increase. Possible solutions to be implemented include encouraging citizens to stay indoors and pointing to unsafe outdoor environments distinct from sealed and safe indoors. Not surprisingly, shading and its improvement are not considered. Creating and improving public shade is, as this and the previous Tarde numbers have argued, a highly urgent matter. As shown above, umbrellas are crucial shading devices used to traverse overheated urban spaces and cast shaded spaces of cooler microclimates. But, these cast shadows are highly individual spaces in the Japanese case. In this section, I would like to speculate about how intentional public shaded spaces could be designed in overheated urban spaces, taking inspiration from the umbrella’s spatiality. I propose to think with smallness, as suggested by the Japanese architect collective Atelier Bow Wow. The duo often works on and theorizes what they call pet-size spaces. They say that Tokyo’s urban environment is very “infectious.” It spreads fast like a fire and changes constantly [9].
Because of inflationary land prices, they see a “void phobia” in Tokyo, the desire to find and fill any gaps that can be seen. Because of this, items around the size of vending machines are abundant in Tokyo. These items are a bit too small to be recognized as architecture, a bit bigger than furniture, the size that “can exist in the corner of a room, or the corner of the city [10]”. Playing with this format, Bow Wow architects created “Sing and Swing,” a shading device in the shape of a giant balloon that creates a micro-shaded public space exploiting the interstices of the Taiwanese urbanscape [11]. Or, they designed a varnished paper origami refuge. Originally used to create privacy and a sense of safety during disasters in evacuation shelters, it could also work as a shading device [12].
They argue that their design takes advantage of the tiny pet-sized effect and has infiltrated the city deeply. For them, smallness is a size that allows freedom in urban action. They conclude, “If we consider the abounding pet-sized objects of Tokyo as an interface between the city and the human body, then our urban environment can become more and more comfortable” [13].
Medellín
Umbrellalogy
What I like most about urban shadows—those mundane and opaque figures produced when a random object blocks sunlight—is their playful attitude toward time. As they roam our terrestrial surface, they move gracefully alongside us as we all orbit the sun on our own axes. According to Plato, time is the moving image of eternity [14]. Conversely, shadows —urban shadows— represent moving images of the time-altering and transforming life of the city.
A few months ago, I went on a two-week shadow safari around Medellín, Colombia. As a member of the Department of Umbrology (DoU), I aimed to study shadows’ physical and relational dimensions. However, rather than observing all types of shades, my observations focused on tiny opacities: narrow, volatile, and individual shadows, the portable tools producing them, and the temporal climatic regions generated by them.
For this joint number, the last in the Shadows trilogy, I have prepared a quick and speculative observation exercise inspired by the DoU collective work displayed in Tarde’s numbers 6 and 8. This exercise proposes a topology of tiny opacities and a visual “ethological inventory” to consider shadows as more-than-human climate entanglements and regions of opacity where multiple actors and elements converge.
While in previous explorations, the gaze was on traditional urban locations such as playgrounds, sidewalks, or streets, this issue considers smaller areas that may fit into the “private realm” but that occur and are displayed in the public space of cities worldwide. These areas are temporal shadow-spaces produced under umbrellas and parasols. These urban mobile scenarios appear as a response to the sun, its heat, and the atmospheric and physical sensations it creates. In a rough sense, this exercise could be seen as a spontaneous practice of watching people using umbrellas to escape the scorching sun. And although it may be true, there is also a sort of poetic complexity and reflection behind it.
Why Medellín
Like all other places on the Equator, Medellín has 12 hours of daylight all year long. That celestial consistency produces a sort of rhythmic stability during the day, but it also makes the sun feel different than at other latitudes. As the picture below shows, the critical relationship with the sun in Equatorial regions happens due to Earth’s spherical shape and the way it is tilted. That inclination causes two related phenomena:
- Sunlight hits harder. Because Equatorial cities are closer to the sun than other planetary zones, they suffer from higher temperatures. This situation, mixed with poor environmental planning in urban areas, potentiates urban heat island effects such as heat discomfort, poor air quality, and water degradation.
- UV radiation is more intense. Overexposure to this type of light may cause potential skin damage, such as sunburns and even skin cancer. High radiation exposure can also affect plants and animals in cities.
Additionally, rapid urbanization, which has prioritized cement and concrete over green spaces, and the oversaturation of private vehicles have increased the sensation of heat and suffocation across the city. In areas like Medellín’s downtown or near ample avenues, smog, a lack of public shade, and the already-introduced strong sunlight turn the streets into savage spaces of climate wildness.
Despite the implementation of green corridors, big natural infrastructures composed of native trees and plants around main avenues, or other strategic areas around the city, the intensity of sunlight and UV radiation continues to increase as the actions triggering climate change also increase. As a primary, cheap, old-fashioned contingency method, people rely on umbrellas as a first-hand strategy to shelter from the sun.
This rapid exploration hopes to shed some light on those shadow devices and the shadow-spaces they create, bringing them into the discussion and, hopefully, provoking a more robust type of ethnographic exercise that pays attention to shades’ relational nature and crucial role in urban habitability.
A topology of tiny shadows, umbrellas, and canopies
In Medellín, both collective and individual responses to heat and intense sunlight are neither innovative nor different from those in other parts of the world. This exploration aims not to discuss unique methods for facing solar discomfort but to showcase and reflect on a minimal, often personal shade that appears when no other urban shade options are available on the streets. Among many ways, one could categorize those shades by their temporality.
First, there are transitory and ephemeral shadows. Created by portable devices like umbrellas—but also hats, sheets of paper, jackets, books, or any other object one might use to create a temporary shadow—this type of shade has a short lifespan. They are generally mobile, although they can also be stationary. An example of this is a person walking under an umbrella, producing a darker, intimate space in motion. This combination of person, umbrella, shadow, and sun creates a momentary pattern on the ground that is instantly displaced as the person walks and the Earth rotates on its axis.
Second, there are stationary and recurrent shadows. They are usually produced by canopies and, to a lesser extent, by awnings. Stationary shadows can also be mobile. They are linked to formal and informal commercial activities. A stationary shadow appears when a person sells goods in a public and open space. It can be anything: street food, clothes, phone cases, lottery tickets, fruits… people tie parasols to the structure they use to prepare, store, or move their products. In that way, parasols protect not only the seller from the sunlight but also their merchandise and, possibly, their clients. It will always depend on the parasol’s size.
