A Tale of Two Heats
This project explores how systems of labour, energy and inequality continue to recur across different technological eras. Beginning with the argument that living well is not a neutral condition, the research investigates the hidden relationships between platform labour, digital infrastructure and environmental resources in Salford Quays, Manchester.
Historically, the industrial city was organised around visible forms of heat: furnaces, boilers, factories and the bodies of workers. Today, the algorithmic city operates through a different thermal landscape. Data centres process routes, payments, messages and digital services while consuming vast amounts of energy and producing waste heat that remains largely invisible to public life.
The project asks whether this hidden machine heat can be reclaimed as a public resource rather than discarded as waste.
In response, the proposal reimagines the data centre as a civic thermal commons. Waste heat is captured and redistributed through bathhouses, worker-care facilities, canal ecologies, algae infrastructures and atmospheric installations. Through warmth, bathing, resting, waiting and collective ritual, platform workers, public users and aquatic environments become connected within a shared thermal landscape.
Presented through the narrative framework of A Tale of Two Heats, the project draws parallels between the industrial city and the algorithmic city. One heat once disciplined bodies into production; the other is transformed into collective care. By making invisible infrastructures visible, inhabitable and publicly experienced, the proposal imagines a future in which data centres are no longer sealed technical machines, but active participants in civic life, ecological repair and social wellbeing.
