In response, there are emerging forms of experimentation with new logics of microclimatic governance that seek to enclose environments within membranes and develop artificially created internal ecologies that are precisely customized to meet the needs of the plant, animal or human occupants of these new forms of enclosure. to support the continued and reliable environments that are suitable for the reproduction of food, ecologies and human life. Across different urban contexts, anthropogenic change is creating urban conditions that are too hot, cold, humid, wet, windy etc. Again, this is not a replication of an existing nature but a creation of an artificial microclimatised environment that does not actually exist anywhere else.Ĭontrolled environments create specialist forms of microclimatic enclosure that are explicitly designed to transcend the emerging limitations and increasing turbulence in existing modes of urban climatic conditions. For example, Tropical Islands near Berlin is an enclosed tropical rainforest theme park in a former airship hangar with Thai and Bali inspired beaches and atoll pools surrounded by a collection of tropical plants all supported by a complex infrastructure which produces permanent microclimatic conditions for holidaymakers and plants (Engels-Schwarzpaul, 2007). the inclusion of synthetic 'natures' in premium accommodation (housing and hotels) and the production of multifunctional consumption spaces which combine shopping, leisure activities and environmental experience in new enclosures designed to keep a hostile environment outside. This takes at least three forms: artificial leisure centres with indoor ski slopes (Tivers, 1997), climbing walls (Eden and Barratt, 2010), indoor golf simulators, sky diving simulators, sports pitches, aquariums, etc.

Inside, everything is for sale: no longer just material but, even more so, cultural commodities (services, experience, leisure). Outside, the East German Brandenburg province suffers from underdevelopment, unemployment, and a history of xenophobia.

A ‘primordial landscape of consumption’, where ‘primal history enters the scene in ultramodern get-up’, the complex provides a ‘surreal experience of artificial sun, sea and sand, all under one roof’ for those who cannot afford long-haul flights to tropical islands.7 Colourful triggers conjure up dream images - in a duality of utopian and cynical elements.

In a paradoxical relationship, replaying that noted by Benjamin on the nineteenth-century Paris arcades, the hangar signals technological functionality, while the E70-million tropical rainforest theme park inside proffers an escape from rationality. Walter Benjamin called such emblems of architectural modernity ‘dream houses of the collective’. It induced in one reviewer ‘a romantic fascination with architecture as engineering, pure form generated by the rational imperatives of structure and economics’- just like ‘railway stations’ and ‘exhibition halls’. While perhaps not the ‘most important testimony to latent mythology’, the Tropical Island resort’s huge warm-grey steel-and glass dome (former CargoLifter hangar) at Brand, Germany, is at present one of the largest.

Cargolifter artist conception