This intervention presents fourteen stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. Looking analytically and linguistically from this region we engage the terms mahaul, mausam, and aab-o-hawa as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory, and embodied registers. Gathered together the stories scaffold a perspective on climate that connects concerns about broader structural conditions (mahaul); local and lived experiences in different temporal registers (mausam); and socio-material entanglements that demand new ways of knowing nature (aab-o-hawa). An expansive, yet grounded conceptualization allows us to narrate individual cases and local climate stories in their multiplicity and difference, rather than through cumulative effects across much wider geographies. South Asian urban climates provides an analytical frame based on shared colonial history, and geographies connecting experiences of climate across fraught geopolitical borders. These diverse South Asian urbanisms evidence a range of environmental vulnerabilities, while seeking possibilities in already existing climates — in the seas and airs that reorient the experience of land and atmosphere, in centering marginalized voices, in historical remnants to read contemporary urban change, in exploring planning agency grounded in local politics, and from the position of partial knowledge that being within urban climates entails.
Link to the full paper here.
