Accounting for the Local in Heat Action Planning

In this talk, we lay the ground for a temporal and spatial analysis of heat action planning in South Asia and beyond. As we emphasise, drawing on approaches to disaster in science and technology studies, making heat disastrous has had significant implications; both for the urgency with which governments and policy makers prepare for it and the effects they seek to achieve. Drawing on a history of India’s first urban heat action plan, designed for the city of Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat, this paper shows how the prevention of disastrous heat has accelerated the emergence of ‘heat action plans’ as a tool for urban planning. As we show, the rapid roll out of heat action plans as a template for organising and managing public health interventions in Indian cities, has required a particular kind of scalar work and a particularly narrow accounting for urban specificity. This talk draws on ongoing research as part of the ESRC-GCRF funded project, Cool Infrastructures: Life with Heat in the Off-Grid City project, which seeks to understand how marginalized groups in the urban global South are adapting to rising temperatures in their cities.