Article:

Werkzeug Windkanal. Simulationen in der Stadtklimaforschung

Wind Tunnels are important tools in urban climate research. Their production of technological environments combines questions of media studies, meteorology, and engineering. In the 1960s and 1970s, the first systematic urban climate studies of wind tunnels operated with a way of producing knowledge that can be called analogue simulation. It shares a constitutive imprecision with other forms of simulation: its results figure an altered form of facticity beyond binary distinctions of true and false. Wind Tunnels are media technologies of processing and producing climate data as well as of planning urban areas. As such, they implement the epistemic status of analogue simulations in an increasingly institutionalised research on urban climate and hence shape knowledge about the relationship between climates and cities.