I definitely agree with the article - this city would look a lot different without A/C. But the mud adobe and high ceilings work surprisingly well. The heat isn't as bad as you might think either - as one of my wife's colleagues remarked "It is a city that you can eat at least one meal a day outside" which means breakfast or dinner in the summer and lunch in the winter.

My current dwelling is a 50s ranchette with concrete block walls. The orginal Jalousie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalousie_window) windows have been replaced, but the house has no insulation in the attic.

The house had several window A/Cs, one was from the early 80s. I replaced them with a 3-zone minisplit.

I cannot recommend the minisplit enough. Of course, this house is less than 1,000 sqft of A/C'ed space.

You're lucky, you can just use swampcoolers. We have to use electricity to keep cool.

I've been to Arizona in the summer and prefer that kind of heat.

There is a soy-based spray foam insulation I plan on having installed.

http://soythane.mybigcommerce.com/

http://www.biobased.net/

A bit more expensive, but I believe it is worth it.

I'm guessing the author hasn't lived in Minnesota. For one thing, the temperature differential is much higher than in Southern States. It may reach 110 degrees F in Phoenix, but it almost never drops below 32 F. In contrast, Minnesota gets temperatures from 0 F to 90 F.

There's also the question of energy use. The Minnesotan winter makes a huge amount of energy (for heating) an absolute need for survival. When you're used to expending all that energy 4-6 months out of the year, using a much smaller amount to stay comfortable when the temperature peaks above 80 F or so is not an incredibly noticeable loss.

When some sort of active climate control is a requirement for life, it's unsurprising that Minnesota did it first - since AC is more a luxury in the Southern states, even though the heat can kill you if you don't have some sort of effective cooling.

Almost everywhere, AC is truly a luxury.

Stay out of the sun, sweat a little, you'll be fine. Arabs have it much worse.

In humid places, however, sweating is almost useless and you can suffer in mere 90F heat.

The other important point is that somehow folks in Singapore manage to survive, but in Singapore there's never any winter. I once heard a physiologist remark that humans can adjust to a wide range of temperatures, but it takes a few days for the body to reprogram itself for freezing ambient temperatures after spending months in roasting ambient temperatures. That's why the first few days of cold weather in the fall and winter feel really cold and everyone dons parkas, but when spring rolls around the exact same weather feels really warm and everyone puts on their shorts.

So maybe if I set out to live without A/C I'd get more used to it after a while. But the first few days are a killer, and at some point one just gets sick of being listless and warm and starts subconsciously looking for excuses to visit nice air-conditioned buildings.

I noticed this empirically with myself whenever I traveled from California to Sweden in the winter. Coming to Sweden, I'd be cold all the time for the first couple of days, and then back in CA, I'd have hot flashes for a few days there. Nice to know that I wasn't imagining things. :)

Fahrenheit. (It doesn't seem to be true that he intended 100 degrees to be human body temperature. It's possible that he specifically wanted the difference between body temperature and freezing point to be (a power of 2) degrees.)

I won't trade it for Phoenix until I turn 65. But yes, it does make heating, cooling, clothes shopping, and a host of other things a little more difficult than the southern states.

Thanks!

Passive cooling, by contrast, is pretty much adequate (though that's not to say the heat can't kill you if you're out in the sun.) But in any case, when you look at the amount of energy expended on heating, the modest amount expended on cooling is a natural expenditure. I think in general that's why a lot of colder countries like Norway are more rich and prosperous than their warmer counterparts. When it costs $30,000/year just to survive, luxuries start to become a lot less costly as a percentage of income.

- solid rock for the base to hold the structure (hence no marsh, see NYC)

- steel, steel concrete (look at any skyscraper photos) for the structure

- no open windows above the hight of 2-3 floors because of the wind etc. (neither below, because of the smog) -> hence AC. And elevator.

AC was a key building block for the hubs of "Modern North America". The other key was feeding (artificial fertilisers and huge mechanised farms). And an Empire to finance it (just lift the debt ceiling PR euphemism in today's economics terms).

However, we have a second home in Montana where we spend our summer away from the heat and humidity of South Texas. It has no air conditioning and, some summer days get well into the upper 90's here. It is amazing the techniques we'll employ to keep the place cool during the hot days, and they always keep the place in the 70's. We close certain blinds, open the upper windows and lower windows at night. When it cools off we will allow the cool air to pool in our downstairs areas and then close it off and "save" it. We will alternate between upstairs and downstairs sleeping based on the weather.

Being from New Orleans, I treasure cool air, and being in Montana right now I realize how cool it is. No pun intended :)

Nobody here has air conditioning or proper heating. The climate is very benign, rarely getting hot or cold. There's little need for interior climate control, and even less insulation: windows are paper thin and don't shut very tight, among other things. (However, a lot of people do have small portable electric heaters, which are very inefficient to begin with and made more so by the lack of insulation.)

Maybe having or not having AC plays a role as to whether you get to know your neighbors, but it's not the only and certainly not the defining one. Television and not working where you live are, I suspect, far more important.

As to cost of living in general, that's the kind of question that sounds very simple but turns out to have a rather complex answer. Get in touch (see the contact info in my profile) you're interested.

Knowing your neighbors has less to do with air conditioning and more to do with personal motorcar ownership. None of my neighbors owned cars.

Of course, really wealthy neighborhoods in Mexico have tall concrete walls with broken glass embedded in the top around every house. That keeps the neighbors from getting too friendly.

However, I feel like this section (which I consider beneficial without question) was glossed over.

And hubs of business and technology in hot regions of the globe, such as Dubai, may never have taken off... Computers throw off a lot of heat, too. The development of the entire IT industry might not have happened without cooling technologies first pioneered by air conditioning.

That said, I'm just as guilty as the next American. Living in Boston, there's not much I can do about avoiding snow, so at least I have the comfort of my A/C if it gets really bad in the summer. Though I do try to be responsible and limit use to primarily Air Conditioning (eliminating humidity) vs. Air Cooling unit.

[update] As a follow up for anyone in climates which experience hot days but cool nights: if you own a house with an attic, a whole-house fan is a great investment vs. central A/C. In a matter of minutes a whole-house fan can create massive delta temp if it's cool outside at night. It's actually quite shocking how effective it is.

If you're home all day then perhaps not for you, since the best use is to get home from work and turn it on around dusk, turn off overnight (I have a timer set on mine) and next day close up all the windows first thing before work.

It could text/email/call you to open the windows, and not stop bothering you until it detects the windows are open.

The nature of the housing stock is partly responsible, of course. The average British dwelling is 75 years old; retrofitting central aircon to a cramped dwelling with stone or brick walls that wasn't designed for it is a lot hairier than installing pipes for hot water radiator driven central heating.

Mediterranean climate - dry heat, nothing like the American South.

Tel Aviv has a similar climate to Atlanta only with less rain (which doesn't mean it doesn't get extremely humid, just doesn't rain as often).