Roundtable co-organized by Aparna Parikh, South Asian Urban Climates collective and Rupali Gupte, School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai
Several faculty members and students from the School of Environment and Architecture in Mumbai (SEA) came together with other SAUC members as part of a roundtable held at SEA in June 2023.
The roundtable focused on the making of climate infrastructures, with a capacious consideration of how infrastructure is imagined, what it consists of, and what kinds of climates it responds to. Infrastructural interventions to environmental concerns have sometimes exacerbated the impacts of climate change. Beginning with this contention, our focus is on placing large-scale infrastructural interventions in dialogue with small-scale strategies to rework climates, the labor that goes into it, and how it unfolds in urban landscapes. We are interested in the (re)making of everyday climates, who is involved in this process, and how such making can operate at different scales. We discussed more capacious ways of imagining climate, through local lexicons, everyday experiences, hybrid materialities, and other forms.
In moving away from infrastructure as a silver bullet solution to climate change, the roundtable provided different formulations and engagements with technology and the environment. There was an urge to rethink environmental engagements, where infrastructure can potentially help us move from mastery over nature to more relational understandings. Along these lines, a focus on indigenous perspectives and everyday engagements formed an important heuristic to articulate climate change and living with the environment. Concerns were raised about the technological hijack of ecological discourses, where a perpetual mode of crisis becomes the jumping off point for a range of interventions. This brought in discussions about temporality – whether this takes the form of apocalyptic formulations driven by capital that necessitate immediate action but also other ways of being that might involve delays, accommodation, or a longer durée over which the making of environments occurs.
