South Asian Urban Climates is a platform for discussion, collaboration, and emerging scholarship on the histories, power structures, and material assemblages that make up the climate in and across South Asian cities. We are a transnational and interdisciplinary community of scholars, educators, filmmakers, and other practitioners looking closely and critically at the intersections of climate, politics, and urbanism in South Asia.
South Asia is widely recognized as one of the regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
1 Yet mainstream discourses on the effects of the global climate crisis in this region are normally focused, in developmentalist terms, on economic, infrastructural, or national security impacts. Meanwhile cities are often portrayed as sites of acute risk or as levers of resilience. These discourses often leave out how the causes or effects of climate change are constituted within local histories, politics, and experiences.
The effects, experiences, and responses to climate breakdowns in South Asia are inextricably layered with ongoing forms of colonialism, social difference, forms of state and non-state violence, processes of militarization, securitization and development; as well as caste, class, and gender politics, and much more. Changing weather conditions and resultant harm is often exacerbated through ongoing processes of territorial accumulation and dispossession for state-led or private development projects. Similar logics also often prevail in ostensible solutions to climate concerns. The responses to such actions are evidenced in everyday politics as well as forms of solidarity that sometimes operate across scale and location.
Building on a set of conversations started during a three-part seminar series in 2019, entitled
Urban Climates: Power, Development and Environment in South Asia, this platform aims to support research and creative endeavors, and to nurture dialogue about the impacts and experiences of climate change and urbanization in South Asian cities — as they are bound up in colonial projects, made urgent by the current political climates of fascism, nationalism, and drastically uneven development, all of which came sharply into view through the devastating course of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath.
Rather than privileging large-scale effects or solutionist approaches, the idea is to build conversations, collaborations, and conceptual lenses starting from place-based experiences narrated in their multiplicity and difference and to dialogue across local stories that reveal the multi-faceted meanings, challenges, and possibilities of urban climates in the region. Together we seek to capture climate across political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers — and ask how urban climates are historically situated and multiply experienced.
The website is structured through case studies, conversations, and pedagogies.
Case studies present ongoing or new research to understand, examine, and engage relationships between climates and urbanization in South Asian cities. Through a range of empirical examples and conceptual positions, they provide an opportunity to reflect on the multi-faceted meanings, challenges, and possibilities of urban climates across the region.
Under
conversations, we feature dialogue with an international community of urban researchers, artists, designers, and activists working in and on South Asia. Our goal is to present opportunities for building networks, mentorship, collaborations, conversations, and to help expand the vocabularies and conceptual lenses for thinking about urban climates in South Asia.
The
pedagogies section curates resources and approaches to teaching and learning about South Asia’s urban climates across various sites ranging from the classroom, community networks, activist forums, creative practices, and others. We aim to reflect on the potential and tensions of looking across these spaces and the stakes of such learning within the heart of empire as well as its margins.
