Paper short abstract:

This paper describes key methodological considerations and strategies to develop interdisciplinary and multi-scalar understandings of urban heat in ways that can account for its causes and impacts distributed across space and time.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation describes methodological considerations and strategies developed to apprehend heat in urban slums in the city of Hyderabad, India. Two understandings oriented our research: following disaster STS researchers, even as we remain attentive to the proximate effects of heat, it is also important to understand heat as a “slow” disaster whose causes and impacts are distributed across space and time. As a consequence, heat research must track heat beyond acute episodes of extreme heat to understand seasonal variations and their effects over longer time periods. Second, in order to produce impactful knowledge, heat research in “southern city” contexts must devise strategies to produce multi-scalar understandings of heat (from city, to neighborhood, to community, and to the individual) in the absence of reliable publicly available data. Against this background, we developed an interdisciplinary analytical framework that drew on social, natural, and building science approaches that combined fine-grained insights into individual experiences of inhabiting particular thermal spaces with meso-level understandings of the built environments being inhabited, enabling us to produce locally actionable insights. A key emphasis is also on developing methodological toolkits that are replicable and relatively affordable in other southern contexts as well.