Splintered Inhabitations? Heatscapes & Cooling Futures in Urban Pakistan
Nausheen H. Anwar, Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan
How is heat weaponized through architectural, social, and urban planning formations? What does heat mediation look like under these circumstances. In a warming planet, heat has become lethal and stealth-like in its impacts on the human body especially in its natural ability to thermoregulate. Environmental physiologists underscore that humans owe their position today in the balance of species on this planet to the thermoregulatory system. In Karachi’s informal settlements, people complain about nights getting hotter; about the lack of critical infrastructures; about overheated, tired, gendered bodies, about sleepless nights. How might the scenes and conversations of heat talk, help us to reimagine an epistemology of living where you feel a profound sense of fatigue of a future that is dissolving into a contrary procedure: an impossible heated tomorrow for many and a cooling refreshed tomorrow for some.
In this talk, Anwar considers layered modulations of heat as a destructive force in both its visible and invisible manifestations placed in the context of everyday environments and inhabitations. Thus, understanding heat mediation through architectures, social practices, clothing, cooling technologies across a wide spectrum of housing and occupational typologies, including informal settlements and informal workers. This work is based on multiple methods that include targeted household surveys of 13,370 households and 4,217 outdoor workers in Karachi.
Nausheen H. Anwar is founder and director of Karachi Urban Lab (KUL) and professor of city and regional planning, School of Economics & Social Sciences (SESS), Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi. She received her PhD in city and regional planning from Columbia University and has held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University, and at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University Singapore. She holds a joint appointment with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), as principal researcher and urban climate resilience lead, U.K. Her research looks at the interactions between vulnerability, climate change impacts and post-colonial histories/contexts of infrastructural violence, land displacement and anti-poor urban planning in the urban Global South. She is particularly interested in understanding the multi-dimensional risks and uncertainties that arise from these interactions, and the gendered/intersectional implications and impacts on urban systems, people, and public health. She is also interested in understanding how the environment/climate has been represented in post-colonial, mid-20th century, modern architectural practice/thought. Professor Anwar is the recipient of grants from various institutions: IDRC, UKRI/GCRF, ESRC-AHRC, Wellcome Trust, British Academy, ICRC, RSA. She has published widely in academic journals such as IJURR, Antipode, Urban Studies, South Asian History & Culture, EPW and Political Geography; and written articles for national and international media. She is member Technical Advisory Board (TAG), World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization (WHO-WMO), for understanding the risks to health from indoor overheating. Nausheen is on the Advisory Board of the program Humanity’s Urban Future, Canadian Institute for Advanced Studies (CIFAR).
This event is part of the Climate Dystopias in Asia series, which is co-presented with the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change.
