Definitely. Hence adobe in the south west of what’s now the US.
I spent three summer vacations as a teen in Leadville, CO. It snowed on the Fourth of July one year. 
All that being said, and not actually disagreeing with @enipla to be clear, it’s the average high that gets some people. I’d say by far most of the time in the high places, there was no need. But weather is weather, and there were then, and certainly are now weeks that will go by with highs in the mid-to-high 80sF. Now, those are normally brief periods, and with the overnight lows being as down as they are, most homes will STILL not needs AC because the residual cold from overnight keeps the indoors from reaching the high…
I think the situation is much worse in areas where there isn’t the (comparatively) large swing in between the highs and the lows. As we saw in recent heatwaves, if the high is 100, but the low is only 70 or 80, there’s no chance to reset without A/C or the equivalent. Even with this:
Again, I grew up in New Mexico, and even if we further adapted our social patterns (mid day/afternoon rests) and had thick walled buildings that shed some of the heat and allowed overnight drops in temperature (Las Cruces and Albuquerque benefit from being arid high deserts at 4000 feet or above) as I mentioned upthread there’s a cap on how much clever engineering can do, especially considering housing costs.
NOTE - @Ulfreida isn’t -wrong-, we absolutely have a post WW2 and forward boom in what I’d call standardized suburban housing that was put up with little-to-no concern of local climatic conditions, just that it isn’t a perfect fix considering the wide range of climates we choose to live in for reasons both rational and irrational.
All that is a bit of a digression from the OP. There are places that qualify, many in this threat, but just looking at highs and averages is distracting from considering the total impact on perceived comfort, including humidity, the duration, the range in the average and all else.
I mean, if all you wanted was to never have to use A/C as cooling again, we’d all be moving as close to the North/South poles as possible.
For anyone that’s lived in both hot-and-humid (e.g. South Florida, the U.S. Gulf Coast, SE Asia, India) and don’t-need-indoor-AC climates … is indoor air in a non-AC home in, say, Malibu comfortable to someone used to virtually 24/7 indoor AC?
Resident of SE Louisiana here. AC runs year round, and it’s common to run one’s home heater** and AC in the same day. Due to the latent humidity, un-air-conditioned indoor air is uncomfortable even when outside temperatures are in the 60s F (15-20 C). Do people get used to humid indoor air in other places, or do home interiors just not get humid?
** Home heating here is nothing like that in a cold climate. No actual furnace or heating oil or anything like that. Our indoor air handler blows air over natural gas flames. Same blower fan that pushes air-conditioned air around the house.
I didn’t see this, but my wife did - 4th of July fireworks while it was snowing. She says it was quite stunning.
We heat from the sun, and a propane cast iron stove (used to be wood). We turn it down to 63 at night. My wife loves to come down early in the morning, turn it up and sit in front of it. It’s a wonderful feeling.
No mater where we move to, we will have a fireplace/heat stove. I would like 3. One upstairs, one downstairs, and one outside for playing chess in the evening. A fire pit I guess some would call it.
Agreed, it was stunning. And to be clear, it wasn’t heavy snow, but it did last for a while. And watching the fireworks burst as flakes swirl through the air verges on surreal.
For those not familiar with Leadville, it’s a town formerly wealthy from mining with a number of lovely Victorian buildings that is largely now based on tourism, from alpine hiking, summer rafting, and winter snowing.
And it’s over 10k in altitude. Things can get strange there, even by Colorado standards.
If you ever want to visit, talk to your doctor about meds for high altitude - especially if you normally live anywhere you don’t have to use “high altitude” directions to bake.
But, back to the thread, air conditioning as cooling is very rarely needed, as I said a short while ago, BUT air conditioning in the general sense (humidity and heat) are very critical!
I find this hard to accept. Mediterranean to me means Naples, Seville, Athens, Istanbul. During hot summers, people die of heat in Mediterranean countries. From my personal experience, I’ve been unable to sleep at night because it was too hot.
Just to be clear about what I’m asking - it’s not really the vast and highly subjective grey area where people can live without air conditioning, with a greater or lesser level of disomfort and accommodation. As Ulfrieda points out, it’s possible to live without air conditioning anywhere.
What I am really asking about is places where, even if you did have air conditioning installed, you would never feel the need to use it to cool your home.
I grant you that Athens is too hot in the summer, i.e., you would switch on the cooling. But Lisbon, for example, or Cape Town— still a Mediterranean climate— is not nearly as bad. All I meant is that some cities with a Mediterranean climate do not have hot summers. Not everywhere in the tropics is cool, either: for instance, Singapore is kind of, though not super, hot.
I grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, and I think at the time (80s and 90s) domestic air conditioning was uncommon in my middle class neighborhood. That might be different now (I have no idea) but I suspect central air is still very uncommon.
“Need” is difficult to define. It certainly got hot enough that it’d be nice if we had it on the warmest of days. But something about the house construction (outer walls of two layers of air gapped bricks) made it feel relatively cool inside even if it was really warm outside.
I’m now in the Seattle metro area and I’d probably categorize the situation as similar: it isn’t “needed” but there is a week or two per year where it’s really nice to have. We do have it (part of a heat pump HVAC system), but it’s mostly off in the summer so far…
We also didn’t have central heat in Cape Town, and I think that was fine. Here in Seattle I definitely want that. We keep it low (65F) but the importance of taking the edge off was graphically illustrated by our recent 4 day “bomb cyclone” power outage.
Or anywhere else in Alaska, for that matter. Interior Alaska can get quite warm, but I’ve never heard of anyone having AC.
When we bought our house in Portland we were told that AC was unnecessary, as they “only get maybe a week of 90s”. A heat pump was the first thing we had installed after buying the place and didn’t regret it.
My late wife’s family home in León, Mexico, had no HVAC of any type at all. This was a luxury home in a luxury neighborhood. It was sometimes a bit uncomfortable due to cold or to heat, but overall, perfectly fine.
(My house in Nanjing, China, had full HVAC, but everyone told me that I was a spoilt foreigner living in a luxury community. But we had 40° summers and 1° winters, so, yeah, I needed heating and cooling, and more than 90 square meters of space in my home – I’m not Chinese.)
It is not. Few people have it at home (we do, but we’re upper middle) Offices and malls, though, mostly do. Ceiling fans are more common, I’d say (we also have that).
It can get in the 30s here, with record highs in the 40s, but generally summer highs are high 20s.
Climate change, of course, is making those record highs more frequent.
Where you never need aircon in South Africa would be the Garden Route - places like George and Mossel Bay:
Temperatures rarely fall below 10 °C in winter and rarely climb beyond 28 °C in summer.
Where i live in the US Northeast didn’t need AC 50 years ago. Like @Chefguy 's location, maybe a week in the 90s. But i installed central air and use it much of the summer. Global warming. (And i like cooler temps.)
You sound like my gf. She constantly tells me there is no bad weather, just poor clothing choices. She said it again this morning when I returned from the barn in pajama pants and a hoodie. It was 20 degrees and I was freezing.
Another German here. I agree that AC in private homes is almost non-existent here, but I’m sharing the fact that my partner and I are planning to build a detached house for ourselves and were thinking of ACing it while we’re at it. Part of the consideration, however, is that in case of career moves we might rent it out on a temporary basis at some point, and if we go for American expats as a target demographic an AC would be a definite plus.
San Francisco has its own little climate, though. I grew up in San Jose. Everyone had AC. It was quite common during the summer for temps all over the Bay Area to be in the 90s, while The City itself was 65.
In my country of birth, the Netherlands, few people have AC. I open a window when it’s warm.
I am now on a long vacation in the Philippines, it’s 26 C now in the middle of the night, 30 at day, I don’t have AC because I dislike it. One of the reasons I came to the Philippines is that I positively like the heat.
People in the neighbourhood here don’t have AC either but that’s more because of poverty.
Not sure where you heard that. We had a really crappy summer! Air conditioning is required for approx. 2 weeks are year in the UK. Which means it’s basically not required at all and we can suck those two weeks up. Offices and hotels have aircon but probably because you generally can’t open the windows.
Mediterranean areas get considerably hotter than that during the summer, so aircon is standard.
Reading a bit more through this thread … I take it that people without AC in temperate climates are likely to be accustomed to humid indoor air and not find it objectionable. Home design (e.g. ceiling height, window placement) also apparently plays a part in an un-air-conditioned indoor space being comfortable.
I would be interested to stay in a Northern Californian, Irish, or German no-AC home and see what it feels like when it’s a nice, sunny spring day outside (think a perfect May day, before the hottest temperatures of the year set in). Would windows open be necessary for comfort, or can a no-AC home in those areas be “bottled up” and still be comfortable?
Some of the temperatures being thrown around are definitely “turn on the AC” temperatures around here (SE Louisiana, US - subtropical and humid). Here, an outdoor temperature of even, say, 77F/25C plus 90% humidity turns our home into a sweatbox. Never mind when we get our four months of 90+F/32+C temps. Regrettably, our home was built to maximize the efficiency of its central AC, with small windows poorly placed for bringing in a draft.
I work in the Central Coast (California) at a property management company. We manage over 500 properties. I can think of about 3 that have air conditioning.