2024 Sarfraz Lecture

The Sarfraz Lecture in 2024 will be delivered by Dr Nausheen Anwar, Professor of City & Regional Planning and Director of the Karachi Urban Lab, School of Economics & Social Sciences (SESS), IBA, Karachi, Pakistan. Please see lecture title and abstract below.

Splintered Inhabitations? Heatscapes & Cooling Futures in Urban 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 I consider 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.