Life Indoors

‘Life Indoors reads together two major follies of industrial hubris and two major contributors to illness—antimicrobial resistance and toxic chemical exposures—as emerging from a common ontological problem. This generative critique that focuses on the increasingly standardized ecologies of the urban apartment building helps pave the way for radical shifts in the way humans relate to microbes, chemicals, and the environment writ large.’—Nicholas Shapiro, Assistant Professor of Biology and Society, UCLA
‘Written in an accessible and engaging style, Life Indoors does a fabulous job of bringing relational ideas about bodies, health and wellbeing into conversation with indoor ecologies. A thoughtful historical trajectory builds a strong foundation for the de-construction of the home as a “modern techno-capsule”, and to an exploration of the way human life is entwined with microbial ecosystems. This excellent book is full of fascinating insights and has much that will be of interest to a wide audience.’—Dr Benjamin Cooke, Senior Lecturer, Sustainability and Urban Planning Discipline & Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University​In this timely and expansive book, Wakefield-Rann investigates how emerging disease ecologies are undermining definitions of health and immunity that have persisted since the 19th century, and had a formative influence over the design of not only homes, but entire cities. This wide-ranging account traces the links between the history of medicine, modernist design and architecture, the rise of inflammatory disease, the microbiomes of buildings and humans, antimicrobial resistance, and novel chemical pollutants, to show how indoor environments have made us as we have made them. In highlighting the processes that have been missed in designing perfectly controlled interior habitats, Life Indoors shows the limitations of dominant practices, classifications and philosophies to apprehend current indoor pathogen ecologies.