The Affective Economy of Toxic Atmospheres: Sensory Governance, Ecological Intelligence, and the Performative Politics of Urban Mosquito Management

This article considers how atmospheres can play a powerful role in troubling the management of nature in the multispecies city. It brings the cyclical nature of atmospheric causes and effects, the affective values and il/logics that determine human responses to nonhuman threats, and the misguided and potentially deleterious health outcomes that ensue into one analytical frame. Drawing on the empirical case of urban mosquito management in Singapore, it considers how the creation of toxic atmospheres through fogging—blowing insecticides into the air in a bid to kill mosquitoes—is ineffective and sets in motion a cascading series of socioenvironmental consequences. Our argument is that when decisions concerning environmental health are based on sensory governance, there is a propensity for affective illogics to complicate their outcomes. Central to our argument is an understanding of affect as having different registers of meaning and reasoning that do not necessarily align or cohere, and an understanding of the atmospheric as creating new planes of vulnerability, speculation, and control. By developing these understandings, we illustrate the important role of perception in the coproduction of urban atmospheres by humans and nonhumans alike.