We are pleased to share the Spring 2026 issue of the South Asian Urban Climates newsletter. The biannual publication reflects the platform’s role as a site for discussion, collaboration, and emerging scholarship by 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.
In 2025, we received funding from the PJ Dick Innovation Award at Carnegie Mellon University to update our website and support the development of case studies. We have re-launched our website, featuring new content from our 2025 call on Weathering Extremes, as well as updating other case studies, members, and conversations. The new website was designed by Hala B. Malik (Mohr) in summer 2025. We are also thrilled to welcome Ronishka Nalpathil and Ifrah Asif to the SAUC team.
Our 2025 call for case studies focused on Weathering Extremes. Record-breaking heat, atmospheric pollution, water scarcity, and flooding make South Asian cities a widely recognized nexus of the global climate catastrophe. Crises are unpredictable — but extreme weather is a new normal in South Asia. Recognizing the unprecedented convergence of many crises in our present moment, SAUC’s 2025 theme was focused on the creation, management, and experiences of extreme weather. In May 2025, we put out an open call for case studies, inviting contributions from scholars, researchers, and designers across South Asia to think broadly and critically about how conditions become extreme, when they are recognized as crises, and how they operate alongside or in tension with everyday experiences of discomfort, uncertainty, and risk. We asked contributors to consider the temporalities of everyday crises in dialogue with more spectacular forms. We organized three panels to develop the case studies, with Nausheen Anwar, Kasia Paprocki, and Waqas Butt as respondents to each panel. The final case studies are featured on the website.
We started the South Asian Urban Climates collective in 2019, thanks to a seminar series award from the Urban Studies Foundation, to advance dialogues about the place of South Asian cities as crucial sites of climate change. Building on this conversation, Nida and Aparna, along with 12 SAUC members, published a paper in 2023 titled “South Asian Urban Climates: Towards pluralistic narratives and expanded lexicons” in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Today, the need to disinherit eurocentric and colonial epistemological lenses, and to build more equitable spaces of knowledge production is clear and urgent. But we recognize that the material conditions for conducting this type of work remain constricted by institutional and disciplinary gatekeeping, visa regimes, and uneven distribution of financial and social capital — not to mention, at times, state repression, censorship, and more. More than before, our climate present necessitates cutting through these barriers.
By engaging in collective writing, building an accessible online space for research dissemination, and fostering opportunities for community and mentorship, South Asian Urban Climates continues to work towards transcending some of these boundaries and hierarchies.
In November 2023, South Asian Urban Climates organized a book panel for Maan Barua’s book Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) in dialogue with Awadhendra Sharan, Aseela Haque, and Waqas Butt.
In April 2024, South Asian Urban Climates organized a book panel for Waqas Butt’s book Life Beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan (Stanford University Press, 2023) in dialogue with Yaffa Truelove and Dean Chahim.
In June 2023, Aparna Parikh, South Asian Urban Climates collective and Rupali Gupte, School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai organized a roundtable on Making Climate Infrastructures. 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.
We are organizing a panel at the 2026 meeting of the American Association of Geographers in San Francisco. The panel is titled Between world ending and world making: politics of climate and urbanism in South Asia. If you are going to be at the conference, we hope you are able to attend the panel!
Please be on the lookout for our 2026 call for case studies. We will be in touch about it in a few weeks.
