1. Philippe Rahm
Towards
Thermodynamic
Urban Planning
T
he history of urban design and
spatial planning over the past forty
years was largely reviewed from a
macroscopic and aesthetic viewpoint rather than from a microscopic and
physiological one. Re-analysing it from the
microscopic perspective, we can discover the
factors that did influence the formation of
cities. A new evaluation proposed here will
make it possible to create an alternative to
the actual development of urban planning
that is currently based on the principle of
economic globalisation which is unsustainable and unfair to people. It is an ambition of
our studio to contribute to the development
of planetary urban planning to make it more
acceptable, human, honest and fair to all.
Popularisation of the macroscopic and
aesthetic urban analysis must undoubtedly be attributed to Italian architect Aldo
Rossi who, in his book L’architettura della città
(‘Architecture of the City’) of 1966, deprecates
‘naïve functionalism’ that reduces the history
of the city and its design to the physiological
and organic. From the very first page of the
introduction he recognises the physiological
cause as the origin of architecture. The starting point is the biological need that drives
man to ‘construct an artificial climate’, more
favourable for his existence. Evading this
point, Rossi immediately claims that, first and
foremost, man built his environment following
aesthetic and civilisational intents. He studies
those macrostructural intents, deriding all
infrastructural approaches, which he considers naïve. With all due appreciation for Aldo
Rossi’s achievements in the field of theory, and
in a non-polemic spirit, we choose to side with
the naive and to partly contest that macroscopic take, opting to reverse the angle of the
analysis so that it starts from the microscopic
level. If Aldo Rossi seemed so radical in 1970,
it stemmed from the fact that since the 1950s
antibiotics came into wide use in the West, a
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2. ‘One of the main requirements of good health conditions in a big city such as Paris is to foster free circulation of the air we breathe, through gradual removal of
all obstacles which might prevent it [...] and by distancing cities from all centres of impurity and corruption’.
J. de Horne, Mémoire sur quelques objets qui intéressent plus
particulièrement la salubrité de la ville de Paris, Paris, 1788,
[quoted after:] R. Etlin, L’air dans l’urbanisme des Lumières,
‘Dix-huitième siècle’ 1977, No. 9, pp. 123–134 (unless otherwise indicated, all quotations transl. by A.M.O.).
2
A. Corbin writes, ‘Soufflot created a chamber with a
vault whose chaotic form makes it possible to eliminate
stagnant places and to create rising air currents’. A.
Corbin, Le miasme et la jonquille, Paris: Flammarion, 1986.
1
ics, taken twice daily for one week? It should
be pointed out, by the way, that modernist
sunshine and fresh air were not particularly
successful treatments.
What Aldo Rossi considered to be the first
cause in the history of urban planning may
have been in fact merely a consequence of
the use of antibiotics: functionalism preceded
aesthetics, physiology allowed symbolism,
microscopic factors implied the macroscopic
aspects. The reversal of the cause-and-effect
chain, which we will propose to explain the
history of the city and urban planning as
resulting from the macroscopic and physiological considerations, is crucial to design
the future. Partial success of Rossi’s postmodernism of 1970–1980 stems from the fact that it
led to a construction of forms without causes,
leaving merely effects of urban facts. It may
be exemplified by a multitude of new squares
with rich symbolism but without the physiological sense of the previous ones, when it had
been necessary to fetch drinking water before
social bonds were formed. We propose to study
this particular reversal of the cause-and-effect
relationships in urban planning and spatial
design, and as a starting point we choose the
achievements of new schools of thinking of
history, geography and economy.
In his texts Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates
of Human Societies of 1997 and Collapse of
2005, Jared Diamond described the above
mentioned reversal of the cause-and-effect
relationships, pointing out the importance
of environmental factors: climate, geology or
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viruses in human history3. It was Spaniards
who conquered South America, while Aztecs
did not conquer Spain because the viruses
carried by a bunch of conquistadors multiplied more easily and were more lethal than
the viruses carried by millions of Aztecs4. The
history of America presented by Diamond
appears to be much more a consequence of
viral toxicity than a political or religious
programme written in its course. In a
similar way, the American scholar explains
the rise and fall of the Viking civilisation or
of the civilisation on Easter Island, justifying their development by climatic changes
and soil erosion. Following the logic of this
new school of thinking, some scholars have
recently pointed out that the times of social
change in the history of China correspond
to periods of drought in the climate5, while
periods of great cold in the European Middle
Ages are related to an increase in the importance of religion6. We might presume that,
with advances of modernisation, the history
of civilisation should become increasingly
independent of the influence of the climate.
However, in Climate Wars Harald Welzer de-
‘History has proceeded very differently for different
peoples not because of biological differences but due to
differences in environments’. J. Diamond, Guns, Germs,
and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York: W.W.
Norton, 1997, p.9.
4
‘Far more Native Americans and other non-Eurasian
peoples were killed by Eurasian germs than by Eurasian
guns or steel weapons. Conversely, few or no distinctive
lethal germs awaited would-be European conquerors in
the New World’. Ibid., p. 29.
5
‘This is how the collapse of some Chinese dynasties is
related to periods of abnormal droughts’. Hai Cheng, R.
Lawrance Edwards, Les variations de la mousson et la société
chinoise depuis 1800 ans [in:] Des climats et des hommes, ed.
J.F. Berger, Paris: La Découverte, 2012.
6
‘In 1315 (the year of famine during the little ice age
from 1300 to 1350) there were few upheavals but many
prayers. Later there will be less bigotry and more
upheavals’. E. Le Roy Ladurie, D. Rousseau, Fluctuation
du climat en France du Nord et du Centre au temps du Petit Âge
glacière [in:] Des climats et des hommes, op. cit.
3
All illustrations: ©philippe rahm architectes
change which brutally invalidated the whole
hygiene programme of architectural modernism and its physiological language. Critical of
narrow streets and opting for zoning, in the
Athens Charter Le Corbusier deals with bacteria hot spots, thus following the first 18th and
19th century hygienic regulations introduced
by Rambuteau and de Horne1, Maret and
Soufflot2: he is against stale air in dark narrow streets and badly ventilated rooms. The
formal language of the modernist architecture of the 1920s – wide windows and glazed
bays, balconies and solariums for the purpose
of air and solar treatments, as well as white
disinfectant lime slurry – are vivid declinations of the design patterns of Alpine sanatoriums, invented in the 19th century to combat
tuberculosis and other bacterial diseases. This
medicinal language loses legitimacy with the
discovery of penicillin. What is the point of
demolishing small, narrow and dark lanes
or moving flats to spacious parks if it is now
possible to eradicate disease with antibiot-
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3. scribes the opposite tendency. He shows that
natural disasters are behind the wars fought
in the 20th and 21st centuries: to him, climate
change is an underestimated social threat
and it seems we are failing to accept the idea
that this phenomenon, even if described
scientifically, may generate such calamities
as the implosion of social systems, civil wars
or genocide7.
Economist Daniel Cohen believes the same,
offering surprising reinterpretations of what
seemed to be the cause while in fact was the
effect8. He explains the disappearance of
social diversification in the modernist city
not by the Athens Charter, which proposed
to separate the working zones and housing
districts, but by the invention of the lift,
and then RER, the regional express transit
system connecting suburbs to Paris. It was
only yesterday that in a typically formed city
the rich lived on the second floor, and the
poor on the last one. The rich and the poor
met on the stairs and even if they did not
speak to each other, their children sometimes attended the same schools. Since lifts
came into widespread use, buildings started
to be inhabited by the rich or the poor but
never by both because they lived in different districts. The district is decreasingly a
place of social diversity’. As to RER, Cohen
explains that it is not so much a means of
transport that brings people from different
social strata closer as an element contributing to their separation. ‘What is worse, with
RER in use, suburbs tend to be increasingly
isolated from luxury districts. In the past
working class suburbs were not situated so
far from city centres because workers had
to walk to work on foot. With the opening
H. Welzer, Climate Wars, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.
D. Cohen, Trois leçons sur la société post-industrielle, Paris:
Seuil, 2006.
7
8
of RER, the distance could grow. However
demography develops, Paris will never border with Sarcelles. Suburbians go to the city
centre on Saturday nights to feast their eyes
on pictures but then return home’.
Endocrinological Land Development in the 19th Century
Rethinking the history of urbanisation from
the microscopic perspective – endocrinological in the 19th century, and bacteriological
in the 20th century – leads to unexpected
re-evaluation of the process of city and cityscape making. Medicinal properties of iodine
were recognized in the first half of the 19th
century, and were popularised by English
doctors who started to send their patients to
the seaside or to thermal spas where iodine
was administered either in the liquid form:
soda or sea breeze, or in the solid one: fish
or algae9. It resulted in the construction of a
railway network and urban development of
the sea coast. New spa towns were founded,
such as Biarritz, Brighton, Spa, Ostend,
9
‘Making it possible to discover iodine in a great
number of mineral waters where its presence had not
even been suspected before, chemical analyses provided
an explanation of their long-known qualities used in
the treatment of cases where iodine is nowadays successfully prescribed. It was Dr Goindet of Geneva that
had the privilege to introduce iodine, and then its compounds, into medicine. Searching for a method in Cadet
de Gassicourt, he noticed that Russel counselled burnt
rockweed for thyroid. Suspecting that the sponge which
was then used in the treatment of thyroid and rockweed
might owe their properties to iodine, whose presence in
rockweed brine had been proven by Courtois, he tried it
out in the treatment of thyroid hyperplasia and, luckily,
succeeded. Not a year had elapsed since he started his
experiments that he communicated his discovery to
the Helvetian Society of Natural Sciences gathered in
Geneva on 25 July 1820. Two other memoirs by Coindet,
published soon afterwards, proved that iodine was
indeed an efficient medicine for thyroid and was a remedy for scrofulous tumours and certain diseases of the
lymphatic system’. A.A. Boinet, Iodothérapie, Paris: Victor
Masson et Fils, 1865.
Vichy, Arcachon or Évian-les-Bains. At the
local level, urbanisation of Europe in the 19th
century and the invention of tourism are the
formal, planned consequences of the discovery of iodine and its medical applications.
It was also instrumental in the formation
of the image of European cities which since
then turned towards beaches and waterfronts, sprawled and opened towards seas
or lakes, those ‘veritable sanatoriums in the
open air where the lucky sick come to enjoy
the iodine-rich ocean air and pine fluids’10.
For instance, in the 19th century the morphology of Swiss towns was totally reversed for
that reason. Until the turn of the century
buildings faced away from waterfronts and
lake shores into which sewage was poured.
Houses turned their backs at lakes and faced
mountains. It was a total transformation.
Ever since water becomes valuable because
of iodine, new buildings – like those big
residences in Montreux – turn towards lakes.
The high street, which was once situated
away from water, gets doubled with the
construction of new boulevards designed for
strolling along the waterfront. This is how
European lake and sea shores, rehabilitated
owing to iodine, become steadily urban.
Some time later, around 1860, Louis Pasteur
discovers that the air we breathe is not empty but contains bacteria, which are slightly
less numerous in the mountains11. This
medical knowledge, combined with what
might be called the germicidal power of solar
10
Guide Touristique d’Arcachon 2012, http://www.arcachon.
com/upload/GP_Touristique_Arcachon_BD_
K(3).pdf (access: 8 August 2013).
‘Above all, are there any germs in the air? Nobody
claims otherwise because we realise that it cannot be
otherwise’. L. Pasteur, Œuvres, vol. 2, Paris: Masson et
cie, 1922.
O
11
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4. radiation in the treatment of tuberculosis12,
entails impressive urban development of the
Alps: Leysin, Davos and Gstaad are established. Written at the end of the 18th century,
the diaries of Timoléon Guy François de Maugiron or Voyages dans les Alpes (‘Voyages in the
Alps’) by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure imply
that mountain areas were generally avoided
as places of extreme poverty, inhabited by
degenerate people13. The discovery of iodine,
followed by the popularisation of solar treatments, sun bathing or heliotherapy14, recommended in Switzerland by Dr Bernhard or
Dr Rollier, turn these places into favourite
holiday destinations. Just like the theses
proposed by Rossi in L’architettura della città
stem from the discovery of penicillin, the
theses put forward by Le Corbusier in Towards
an Architecture or in the Athens Charter result
from the discovery of iodine, the germicidal
power of sunshine and the observation that
the numbers of microbes decrease in less
polluted air.
Thermodynamic Urban Planning in the 21st Century
Understanding the causal mechanisms is
crucial, and a microscopic mechanism often
enables to reverse their order: what seems to
‘We shall live in the dark, like before. The sun will not
penetrate into residential buildings more than before to
displace the exterminator microbe. To sum up, there is a
lack of airing or light in residential buildings, and particularly – a lack of sunshine. In short, we can summarise the findings of this research with a statement that
tuberculosis is first and foremost a disease of the dark’.
Congrès international de la tuberculose: Rapports présentés au
congrès, Paris: Masson et cie, 1905, vol. 25.
13
‘We attribute the name of cretins to idiots and
imbeciles living usually on mountain passes. Is it not
endemic in more or less swampy mountain passes,
exposed to damp air?’ J.-E. Esquirol, Des maladies mentales,
vol. 2, Bruxelles: J. B. Tircher, 1838.
14
J. Malgat, Cure solaire de la tuberculose pulmonaire chronique [in:] Congrès international…, op. cit.
12
be the cause at the macroscopic level turns
out to be a consequence in the microscopic
perspective. If we want to define urban
planning and territorial strategy towards the
future, we need to analyse the real causes
underlying land transformations. From the
architectural and urban planning points
of view, climatic and energetic parameters
are closely related and seem to be the main
factors that influence and will continue to
influence urban renewal in a given area. The
concept of ‘thermodynamic urban planning’,
which I shall define presently, may encompass a whole set of criteria activated in the
process of urban renewal on our planet.
The microscopic reason which will certainly
underlie all major architectural and urban
planning decisions in the 21st century is
carbon dioxide (CO2). It is expected to play
the key role; for two decades we have been
trying to embrace the negative consequences
of the growth of CO2 concentration in the
atmosphere caused by non-renewable energy
consumption, such as oil or gas. Fuel combustion releases CO2 into the atmosphere, which
forms a sort of cover that makes it impossible for surplus energy accumulated over
the earth to escape into the outer space. It
results in global warming, disturbing the
climate balance, on which urbanisation of
the planet has been based for centuries, and
causing disasters and migrations. Energy
consumed by buildings (heating, ventilation, air conditioning or hot water production) is responsible for emitting about 50%
greenhouse gases. Hence, architecture and
urban planning are directly involved in an
ecological and civic mission for the reduction of energy consumption. The discovery
of the role of CO2 in global warming and
the dissemination of that knowledge by the
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change) since 1988 certainly determines
the end of postmodernism and invalidates
reading and designing purely aesthetic and
symbolic architecture. The necessity to deal
with climate warming imposes new duties on
architecture and urban planning, and confronting them is a matter of no less import
that the confrontation with bacterial diseases was for modernism in the 19th century.
Following the Fukushima disaster (2011), a
nuclear disaster was added to the climate crisis, forcing a process of steady abandonment
of this kind of energy. Deprived of unlimited
access to fossil fuels or nuclear energy, and
unable to immediately replace them with
renewable energy sources, such as the sun
or wind, at the beginning of the 21st century
we are urged to immediately reduce energy
consumption. In this context, with view to
the necessity to save it and use natural local
energy sources, it is time to define the concept of thermodynamic urban planning; just
as we are beginning to practise architecture
called green, solar, ecological or meteorological.
Thermodynamic urban planning may prove
to be a new way to come to terms with
globalisation, through reorganization of
industrial production at the planetary level
based on energetic and climatic, rather than
economic, criteria. We are currently at the
peak of the postindustrial society crisis,
which was based on global distribution of
labour divided between the North, with
highly qualified personnel developing ideas,
programmes, design and marketing, and the
South, with unskilled workforce manufacturing objects, computers or clothes. Until 1960
the South exported only raw materials for
use in the North. Since the 1960s industrialisation of the South has entailed de-industrialisation of the North; since then the South
has been exporting ready-made products,
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5. leaving the North to develop product concepts, design and marketing. This situation
is risky because the technological advantage
of the North over the South is decreasing
on a yearly basis and it is predictable that
production of ideas, design and concepts will
soon reach the same level in the South as in
the North, which will automatically reduce
employment and increase unemployment, especially in Europe. How is Europe and France
to be seen in this regard? What can France
do, with its limited industry and extensive
technological expertise (nuclear energy,
TGV) which will soon become obsolete, in
view of technologies developed in the United
States, including Google and Facebook, if it
neither develops nor manufactures its own
products? There remains the production of
luxury goods, cultural and culinary tourism
so well described by Michel Houellebecq15
as the future of industrial France huddled
around the ‘territorial magic’ of its countryside. Cheeses, cold meats, woodpigeons and
snails, the Massif Central and a network of
routes ‘Lodging and Castles’. Indeed, cynicism aside, some products belong to a given
territory, which is inextricably related to a
certain climate, quality of mineral soil that
gives produce unique taste, just like lime soil
and sunshine to the great wines of Bordeaux.
It is not about skills or cultural traditions
which globalisation will certainly copy, hybridise and delocalise but certain geographical, geological and climatic conditions that
are unique and characteristic for a place: as
Houellebecq has it, it is a regional category
rather than a state one. Although it is impossible to transfer wine production from
Bordeaux to China or Bangladesh, it will not
hinder the establishment of new territories
like Napa Valley in California or Ningxia in
M. Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin
Bowd. New York: Knopf, 2012.
15
China whose wines were classified as the best
in the world in 2011.
To explain the concept of thermodynamic
urban planning, we can start from three
examples illustrating a characteristic mode
of exploitation of unique energy resources
typical for a given geographic location. The
first example is the transferring of Facebook
servers from California to Lulea in Sweden.
Computers storing a gigantic amount of
information overheat, and cooling them
requires a tremendous amount of energy.
The average annual temperature in Lulea is 2
degrees Celsius, and it is easy to understand
what savings (in tens of billions of dollars)
the American company can make by moving
the servers from the Mediterranean climate
of California, where the average annual temperature is 19.5 degrees Celsius.
These three examples point at new, unusual,
almost uninhabited urbanisation areas such
as the north, deserts and high mountains.
They have nothing in common with the
places that have undergone urbanisation
since the beginnings of humankind. In the
21st century we will witness a radical modification of the criteria of geographic value; we
will see a change of human geography which
will entail the establishment of new cities
and a collapse of old ones.
Thus, climate will have a key role in future
urbanisation of the planet, following the
global thermodynamic values related to the
location parameters, with regard to latitude
and altitude. It may turn out to be a solution
fostering globalisation based not on unjust salaries or a specific international distribution of
labour but on ecological and climate criteria
applied on the scale of global population.
The second example is the Swiss village of
Trient. The small village, with a population
of 150 residents, hidden in the rugged mountains of the canton of Valais, without a ski
lift, will receive several million Swiss francs
in the next few years because it has a glacier
that supplies water to a dam which provides
electricity to the whole Swiss railway.
The third example is the German project
Desertec, under which it is proposed to cover
the whole of Sahara with solar panels to
supply electric energy to the whole of North
Africa and Europe16.
16
‘All kinds of renewables will be used in the DESERTEC
Concept, (…) but the sun-rich deserts of the world play
a central role: within six hours deserts receive more
energy from the sun than humankind consumes within
a year. In addition, 90 percent of the world’s population
lives within 3,000 km of deserts’. http://www.desertec.
org/fileadmin/downloads/desertec_foundation_flyer_
en.pdf (access: 8 August 2013)
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6. therModynaMiC parK
We have applied global thermodynamic
principles on a microscale in a city park in
Taiwan: we created climatic differences as if
we were to reorganise the planet’s geography
reduced to the size of the park. The structuring principle is differentiation of climatic
environments: from naturally existing
warm, humid and polluted ones to newly created cooler, less humid and less polluted areas. Departing from what already exists, we
defined three climatic maps, each of them
typical for a given parameter of the atmosphere: the first one describing temperature,
the second one referring to air humidity, and
the last one describing the level of air pollution. Each of these maps contains modulations of respective parameters: from areas
with extreme climatic conditions to those
with deeper modifications and thus more
suitable for human habitation. These three
maps cross each other, freely overlap and
thus create diverse microclimates, a multitude of various environments within the
park’s space. One part will always be warmer
but less humid, with less polluted air, while
other parts will be cooler, drier but will have
polluted air. The three climatic maps are
based on the gradation principle: from 100%
inconvenient, naturally intense conditions
– typical for a local city (100% pollution,
100% humidity, 100% heat), to more pleasant
zones with levels reduced even to 20%, where
temperature, humidity and pollution were
reduced to a minimum. To work out these
three meteorological maps, we developed an
extensive system of devices each of which
reduces excess heat, humidity or pollution.
What I call ‘meteorological devices’ are both
plants, trees with specific qualities that absorb pollution or reduce insolation through
dense foliage and waterspouts, humidifiers,
fountains or technical solutions such as air
dehumidifiers or mosquito repelling ultrasonic speakers. If we want to create a cool
place, we increase the number of appropriate devices. Depending on their density in
a given area, we create more or less pleasant and convenient spaces where climatic
conditions sometimes overlap, combine,
condense or, conversely, separate and dilute,
generating diverse atmospheres which users
can freely choose at will. Climatic devices
are contemporary extensions of traditional
park facilities: small constructions, such as
benches, fountains, kiosks, garden pavilions or gazebos. Each of the devices reduces
inconvenience caused by climatic factors at
work and diffuses a more favourable climate,
influencing one parameter only. The first
are air dehumidifiers, followed by purifying
devices, the third ones are air refreshing,
light diffusing and shade creating devices. If
we want to achieve a low level of humidity
in a given spot in the park and create a drier
place, we simply place more air dehumidifiers there.
translation froM frenCh:
aleKsandra wojda
english translation:
anna MirosławsKa-olszewsKa
taiChung gateway parK
authors: philippe rahm architectes, mosbach
paysagistes, ricky liu & associates
investor: taichung city government
location: taichung, tajwan
total area: 70 hectares
design: january 2012 – december 2012
completion: january 2013 – july 2015
aleKsandra wojda
Meteorological devices and the type of soil
which determines them are the basic elements of our composition, scattered over
the landscape in the form of various levels
of concentration depending on the intended
level of efficiency. They enable modulation of
the landscape texture and are unique to our
architecture.
The distribution of programmes – public
utility buildings, recreational areas, passages
or playgrounds – takes place in a natural
way, depending on the intensity of the new
climatic zones. In the least convenient places
there are closed air-conditioned buildings.
Recreational areas are situated in the most
favourable climatic zones, where the humidity levels and temperature are the lowest,
and the pollution is minimal.
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7. pollution_map.pdf
1
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16:45
plan-general.pdf
sections.pdf
1
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sections.pdf
1
1
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16:45
16:44
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philippe rahm architectes, mosbach
paysagistes, ricky liu&associates,
general plan of the thermodynamic
park in taiwan, design: 2012,
completion: 2013-2015
the architects developed three spatial
narrations including layouts for
devices connected, respectively, with:
temperature (pink plan), humidity (blue
plan) and environmental pollution (grey
plan). the narrations overlap, forming
the general plan of the construction
(right).
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8. Humid air
Electric fan
Refrigerated coil
H20 condensation
Dry air
Concrete slab with
radiant tubing
Humid air
Condensation
Dryer air
Cooled fluid
Water
drain
Underground
heat sink
(2m depth)
29˚C
Atmosphere
25˚C
Top soil
18˚C
Eluviation layer
12˚C
Subsoil
hot air
Cool air
Electric fan
12˚C
constant earth
temperature
Mosquitos
Mosquito-free
space
Noise pollution
Quiet space
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