Scale and Modularity in Thermal Governance: The Replication of India’s Heat Action Plans

Khandekar, Aalok (2023) Scale and Modularity in Thermal Governance: The Replication of India’s Heat Action Plans. Urban Studies. pp. 1-37. ISSN 1360-063X (Submitted)

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Abstract

Since 2013, when the first urban Heat Action Plan (HAP) in India was developed in and for the western city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, there are now more than 30 HAPs focused on different cities, regions, and entire states in the country, many following the original template developed in Ahmedabad. This essay inquires into the temporal and spatial politics of such heat action planning, asking: what is the nature of thermal governance that HAPs posit? Based on our analysis, we suggest that two key attributes characterize Indian HAPs: first, they enframe heat waves as disasters; second, as the Ahmedabad template has travelled to other locations, HAPs have ceased to engage with their local contexts in any meaningful way. We further argue that such a conceptualization of HAPs has produced important obfuscations, shaping official knowledge about and responses to extreme heat in ways that are unable to grapple with the messy, uneven, and contested nature of the socio-political terrains in which they are supposed to intervene.

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IITH Creators:

IITH Creators	ORCiD
Khandekar, Aalok	UNSPECIFIED

Item Type:

Article

Additional Information:

Research for this manuscript was supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC), UK Grand Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) for the project, Cool Infrastructures: Life with Heat in the Off-Grid City (Award No: ES/T008091/1). We gratefully acknowledge inputs from participants at the workshop, “Heat in Urban Asia: Past, Present, and Future,” hosted by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore in April 2021, funded by the Ministry of Education (Singapore) Academic Research Fund, Tier 2 Grant, MOE2018-T2-2-120, where an early version of this paper was presented. We are grateful to the three anonymous peer reviewers of this manuscript for Urban Studies, who pushed us to articulate our core conceptual argument as positing the replication of HAPs as an interplay between scale and modularity. Finally, for their editorial guidance and support, we thank Gregory Clancey, Jiat Hwee Chang, and Simon Marvin, the editors of the special issue on “Heat and the City: Thermal Control, Governance and Health in Urban Asia,” in which this essay is being published.

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Heat Action Plans, India, Climate Change, Disaster, Thermal Governance, Southern City

Subjects:

Social sciences > Political Science & Economics
Social sciences > Social Services
Arts > Liberal arts

Divisions:

Department of Liberal Arts

Depositing User:

Team Library

Date Deposited:

02 Aug 2023 04:44

Last Modified:

02 Aug 2023 04:44