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Earlier this year we had a conversation with Vivek Mustafa Gilani from Fair Conditioning Foundation about how his organization is rethinking 'cooling' not just as a matter of comfort but as a human right for all.
Tell us your name, your title, and your role in Fair Conditioning?
VMG: My name is Vivek Mustafa Gilani. I am a member of the Fair Conditioning Foundation and the co-founder along with allies Noé21 (New Economic Orientation for the 21st Century), a small NGO in Geneva in Switzerland. I am also the founder of another social enterprise called cBalance Solutions Hub, which works on strategies for greenhouse gas (GHG) emission mitigation and reduction. It is focused on all aspects of the climate crisis, as long as there's a theory of change that aims to transform social structures and not just react with end-of-the-pipe technology fixes.
Perfect. So, could you walk us through the history of Fair Conditioning, why and when it was created, and what the mission of the organization is?
VMG: Fair Conditioning started by accident in 2012. This group, Noé21, had heard that India had launched the first "green AC," meaning an air conditioner that used a non-fluorinated gas refrigerant—a propane-based air conditioner. At that time, they had a limited vision: to accelerate the uptake of this AC because they felt these kinds of solutions don’t get picked up due to status quo inertia. The HVAC economy has vested interests in keeping the technology the way it is because it makes everybody a lot of money. So Noé21 wanted civil society organizations to legitimize this technology in architecture education and practice.
In 2012, we were naive. We thought the problem was air conditioning, and the fix was better air conditioning. But by 2015, we realized that wasn’t enough. The problem of why so many ACs are being installed in India wasn’t being addressed. It was reacting to the symptom, not the disease. So, we revised our theory of change: without addressing mindsets and norms in architecture education and practice, we won’t reduce the climate harm of cooling technologies in India.
We developed a three-pronged program:
Our mission up till 2020 was to make sustainable cooling the non-negotiable default in education, practice, and construction, not a premium value addition.
Your background seems engineering-focused, but you’ve moved into architecture and systems design. Could you talk about how your background allowed you to make those mental leaps?
VMG: Thank you so much for actually detecting the fact that this is not just an engineering approach anymore, and it's not even a purely architectural approach anymore. We realized that as engineers, we are far more comfortable with numbers and far less comfortable with people and systems and these competing socio-economic cultural factors which reproduce the status quo. I'm trained as a chemical and environmental engineer, and since then, I have learned energy auditing as part of my professional development.
But frankly, and maybe this is going to be a bit of a shock to your readers, I did not know how an AC worked. And of course, I had studied it a little bit in college, but I really did not know anything about cooling till then. So I had to teach myself the basics of building physics and cooling to be able to respond to this challenge.
In 2020, we realized there’s a humanitarian crisis: people in informal settlements can’t sleep till midnight due to heat, especially under tin or cement-asbestos roofs. The privileged, with ACs and backup power, sleep fine.
Could you talk about climate trends in your city, especially extreme heat, and how the built environment is making them worse?
VMG: So for about eight years, up until 2020, our preoccupation was the formal world - formal built world—middle and upper class buildings and communities. But only 10% of Indian buildings are actually designed formally by architects. Most of the buildings we came to know don't ever see the desk of an architect and are never drafted in AutoCAD or rendered in Sketchup. The built environment is both a victim and a perpetrator. In 2020, we realized there’s a humanitarian crisis: people in informal settlements can’t sleep till midnight due to heat, especially under tin or cement-asbestos roofs. The privileged, with ACs and backup power, sleep fine. Women in these informal settlements wake at 4 or 5 AM to fetch water, cook, and clean. We realized our work was furthering comfort for those already comfortable. So we pivoted to address extreme heat in informal settlements, starting in Mumbai and Pune, and now expanded to six cities: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, and New Delhi.
Entering this realm was terrifying, though, because NGOs in India typically avoid working in informal settlements. We are entering a disorganized world, not the kind of world that we study in textbooks; there are very few policies crafted for places like these. It's actually in this blind spot between government authorities and civil society in India.
Historically, how have vernacular Indian building practices managed extreme heat?
VMG: If you look at a lot of the buildings of Rajasthan or the arid parts of India, a lot of them have these light-coloured plaster roofs and walls, so that even if the walls do get hot, they radiate very little heat to the occupants. [This is an example of radiant barriers: use of materials with high reflectivity and very low emittance, which enable them to reflect the radiant heat energy and give off (emit) very little]. Similarly, vernacular architecture from arid parts of India, where you have very cool nights and hot days, also has very thick walls and roofs, sometimes more than six feet thick. [This is an example of thermal mass: During summer, it absorbs heat during the day and releases it by night to cooling breezes, keeping the house comfortable].
We are using these ancient principles and building practices and applying it to our current context. So, we have figured out a way to shield the roofs and the walls with some kind of shiny layer (radiant barriers), we can get the benefits of low emissivity surfaces, which ancient buildings benefited from by having light-coloured walls. We are transposing an old idea into a new context.
How familiar were you with the engineering principles within these ancient buildings before starting this work?
VMG: So, this actually ties into the education work that we were already doing from 2012 to 2015. Fair Conditioning has been running a curriculum integration program, and one of the major thrust areas was to revive these concepts of building physics and make them available to the design-thinking mind of the students. In India at the very least, we've retained the pedagogy around traditional architecture, and in almost every university, there is a Vernacular Architecture course. You don't study this in great detail, and you almost never actually apply it in a design project, as design projects are always something conventional, but at least you learn it.
We realized students were being taught without a real understanding of the building physics principles. So, to give you an example, a lot of teachers were confused about the difference between thermal mass and insulation. They would actually say things like, “Oh, thick walls insulate your building”, which is patently wrong. The process is thermal mass, it's not insulation. So, between 2015 to 2020, we learned a lot about building physics ourselves, and we engaged with some of the smartest people.
One was this 87-year-old guy, a retired engineer who spent most of his career working for one of the largest air conditioning companies in the world. But he, for many years was helping make the problem worse. He has been critical to innovations around structural cooling. It's not like he invented it, but how to apply this in conventional architectural buildings is his invention, but it's an open-source invention, so he hasn't patented it or anything.
We have been bringing this kind of knowledge and this kind of recontextualizing of these old passive cooling methods into education for many years. So, in a way, when we got to understand that informal settlements have even worse problems of cooling, we just basically used that same technical knowledge system and have been applying it to a new context -informal settlements. So that's really our journey with the episteme and the pedagogy surrounding these building physics.
We didn’t want to repeat the horrors of development where we only address our agenda and pretend to listen to the community and in fact make them victims of our development.
Walk us through the design process for your cooling prototypes. What were the main design considerations?
VMG: Before we came up with designs, we first had to come up with the ways in which we wanted to do this work. We didn’t want it to be another saviour-complex NGO where we “feel sorry” for these communities and swoop in with our technocratic ideas and good intentions. We didn’t want to repeat the horrors of development where we only address our agenda and pretend to listen to the community and in fact make them victims of our development. So first, we set principles:
We started by identifying civil society partners in each city. We held active listening workshops to understand community concerns. If heat was validated as a priority, we’d invite 30 homes for participatory design workshops. We aimed for 15 demos (3 homes per idea × 5 different ideas for cooling). In these workshops, we’d present small prototypes or discuss concepts like ventilation or insulation. Communities would critique or improve them. After workshops, we’d audit homes structurally and for passive cooling potential to finalize solutions.
So, during this testing phase, what were the metrics that you were looking for? Because many of these cooling interventions provide co-benefits beyond just temperature reduction.
VMG: So we would trust the community to choose. Rather than us second-guessing what metrics were most important for us, we would just ask them. We’d explain the pros and cons: rooftop gardens offer thermal mass, evapotranspiration, and shading but may need roof reinforcement. Ventilation improves air, but doesn’t address wall heat as much. External radiant barriers that provide an exoskeleton for the roof have the added benefit of reducing sound. Households decided based on their priorities.
Once you've decided the building physics principle, it very quickly becomes a mechanical design problem. We co-designed mechanical elements with community members—like masons or mechanics. Wherever we found people with relevant technical skills we took them on board to co-design the specific elements of the cooling intervention. For example, one community member who was actually a college dropout, engineered a water circulation system with pipes and an aquarium pump. We relied on the intelligence of the community members to problematize and to red flag some of the things that could go wrong in terms of the design or point out enhancements that they had come up with.
One cooling design intervention was a system of PET bottles, filled with water that would be secured within the grooves of the corrugated sheets like a natural holding place. During the participatory design process, one of the home members said that these plastic bottles are quite vulnerable to the claws of cats. And we said, “Yeah, okay, that sounds interesting, but are there cats?” They're like,” Of course, there are many cats on our rooftops!” So we were immediately stumped by this. And almost at that same moment, somebody else said “Hey, but you know what you all could do? You could put a wire mesh around the plastic bottles.”
We've experienced something similar, where we think we have this wonderful idea but we are blind to very obvious issues that will tank the entire design.
VMG: Exactly. With almost every design solution, they had pointed out things that couldn't work. And frankly, you couldn't pay enough money to a consulting company to provide this type of insight. You know, basically, the “McKinsey approach” is 30,000ft above the air, so much so that it never unearths these things that the community members will point out, alert you, and sometimes even solve for you. It’s an incredible resource to trust the intelligence of the ones who endure this day in and day out. You know, they have been brewing and brimming with solutions.
What are the plans for moving from this sort of prototyping, researching, and co-production of knowledge into scaling? And what does scaling look like? Fair Conditioning is already in six cities. What does the future hold?
VMG: So I would say our scaling vision has three dimensions to it.
So in that trajectory of scaling, where does the education component fit in? Are both of them happening simultaneously?
VMG: Simultaneously, yes. India currently has more than 450 architectural colleges that are controlled by 150 people - members of the board of studies who control the curriculum. So our strategy is very clear. We are trying to influence these 150 people. But even smaller than that, we are trying to get to the four or five universities that govern 50% of India's university syllabus to integrate two key things: sustainable cooling and passive design, but also an understanding of informal settlements. Our theory of change is to tip four universities and demonstrate how four universities can set the curriculum to make it fit for purpose for the climate crisis that we're in. And that can then be emulated by all of the other universities of India
That’s truly inspiring Vivek. To wrap up, do you have any parting thoughts or words of wisdom to leave for folks in the Caribbean working on tackling major issues in the built environment?
VMG: I know this is going to be a little difficult because the culture of architecture over time, has become more and more specialized. But I think we need to recover that passion for being generalists. So to artificially limit ourselves by saying “Oh, you know I'm an architect, so I'm much more concerned about form and aesthetic and I'm not so much into function”. I would say the biggest learning for me has been to shed all these kinds of self-imposed limitations on what you think your role in the world is.
I recently saw a billboard outside a church that said, “Start where you are, use what you have, and do what you can”. To me that means look around, look at what's needed in your local neighbourhood, because till you can be of service, there's no point trying to solve all the world's problems. We are the people we’ve been waiting for. No one else is coming to solve this.
That’s a wonderful way to end. Thank you, Vivek. Obviously, we are big fans, and I'm very excited to put this story into our context here in the Caribbean.
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