When Cooling Becomes Refuge: Emotional Spaces of Underground Heat Adaptation in Chongqing
Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Chongqing, this study argues that public underground cooling shelters function as everyday refuge not merely through thermal relief, but through the relational accomplishment of accessible, flexible, and socially legitimate spaces that enable sustained, unselfconscious use.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
When the summer sun beats down on a city, the most obvious solution is to find a cool place to sit. For decades, scientists and city planners have measured how well a building keeps the heat out, counting degrees of temperature and calculating how much shade a tree provides. But a new kind of research is asking a different, quieter question: just because a room is cool, does it actually feel like a safe place to stay? This line of inquiry belongs to a field that looks at how our feelings and our bodies interact with the places we live. It suggests that a space is not just a collection of walls and air conditioning; it is a relationship between the person entering, the people already there, and the rules that govern the room. If a place is too hard to get to, too strict, or too lonely, the cool air might not be enough to make someone feel welcome. Understanding this difference is crucial for cities facing hotter summers, because a shelter that no one can or wants to use offers no protection at all.
In the mountainous city of Chongqing, China, where summer temperatures can climb to dangerous levels, researchers recently spent six weeks exploring this exact problem. They focused on a unique network of underground spaces. For years, the city has repurposed its old civil-defense tunnels—built decades ago to protect people from air raids—into free public cooling centers. These are not fancy museums or paid attractions; they are simple, concrete rooms where anyone can go to escape the heat. Between July and August 2025, a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley visited eight of these public cooling sites and four similar underground spaces that had been turned into restaurants, bookshops, or museums. The goal was not to measure the temperature with instruments, but to watch how real people moved through these spaces, how they felt, and what stopped them from staying. The researcher interviewed 46 people, including regular visitors, staff members, and the people who designed these spaces, while also spending over 140 hours simply sitting and observing.
The study found that the moment a person steps from the scorching street into the cool tunnel is often a mix of relief and struggle. For many of the eight public sites, the entrance was not a simple door. In five of the locations, visitors had to walk down between 12 and 30 steps to reach the cool air. Some of these staircases had no handrails. While the air inside felt like a sudden gift, the journey down could be a barrier. One 72-year-old man described the instant relief of the cool air, saying it felt like someone had turned off the heat, but he also noted that his wife would not come because she could not manage the steep steps. The research showed that for older adults or those with mobility issues, the physical effort required to enter could cancel out the benefit of the cool air. Even when people got inside, the experience varied wildly depending on the details of the room. Some spaces felt damp and smelled of wet concrete, which made some visitors leave after an hour, while others, who had lived through hotter times in the past, cared little for the smell as long as the temperature was low.
Beyond the physical entry, the social atmosphere of the room determined whether it felt like a refuge or a prison. In the most successful sites, regular visitors had formed small, friendly communities. They knew each other, saved seats for one another, and shared food or tea. For these people, the space was a place of belonging. However, for a newcomer walking in, that same arrangement could feel intimidating. One woman described trying to visit a popular site, only to feel like an intruder because everyone else seemed to know each other and had claimed their spots. She sat near the door for twenty minutes, feeling awkward, and then left, never to return. The study revealed that the way chairs were arranged and how people interacted could either welcome a stranger or push them away. Staff members played a huge role here too. In some places, workers were friendly and helpful, making visitors feel cared for. In others, the staff seemed to be watching and enforcing strict rules, such as forbidding people from lying down or taking off their shoes. When visitors felt watched or restricted, the space felt less like a public shelter and more like a school classroom or a waiting room where they did not quite belong.
The researchers also compared these free public shelters with underground spaces that had been turned into commercial venues, like a hotpot restaurant inside a former bomb shelter. In the restaurant, the cool air was part of the experience, but it came with a price tag and a set of expectations: you had to buy a meal to sit there. The manager of one such venue explained that the coolness was a practical advantage that saved money on energy, but the real value was the history and the story of the place. For the regulars of the free shelters, this distinction was vital. They emphasized that the public sites were a true refuge because they did not have to spend money or pretend to be tourists to cool off. They could just sit, rest, and exist without explaining themselves. The study showed that while the underground air was the same in both types of buildings, the rules of access and the purpose of the space changed who was allowed to linger.
Ultimately, the research suggests that creating a heat shelter is not just about engineering a cool room. It is about designing a place where people can enter without exhausting themselves, sit without feeling watched, and stay without needing to buy something. The study identified three main things that turn a cool room into a true refuge: easy and clear ways to get in, seating that allows people to rest comfortably in different ways, and a social environment where people feel they have a right to be there. When these elements were missing, even the coolest air could not make a space feel like a home. The findings do not claim that every city needs to copy Chongqing's tunnels, but they do offer a clear lesson for anyone building shelters for the future: if you want people to use a place to survive the heat, you must make sure they feel safe, welcome, and free to stay.
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