Data Analytics and Reflections from a Research Project on Heat in Informal Settlements

Introduction and Background

In 2023, the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, with the support of Swastik Harish and Associates and the Hyderabad Urban Labs conducted a series of studies around heat in informal settlements in the city of Hyderabad, India. Moving away from the simpler notions of heat waves, extreme heat events and policy responses such as Heat Action Plans, the research aimed to find out how exactly heat is experienced in informal settlements, which we believe is important for researchers, practitioners as well as decision and policy makers.

This approach led to the development of a few innovative, in-depth, embedded and sustainable methods to measure heat and its impacts. These included developing and stabilizing data streams from at least three distinct but overlapping disciplines: social science, building science and natural science. This blog contains some of data analysis from these streams of information, along with reflections of researchers from the field. We also include some emergent ideas for mitigating heat in informal settlements. We hope you enjoy reading through these pieces.

Do contact us at askhydlab@gmail.com if you have any thoughts and suggestions to share. We will continuously be updating this blog as further analysis emerges from the field. You can scroll down to the data analytics and reflections posts or click a tag in the cloud below to start browsing and searching for themes.

Quick Links

Click these buttons to go to some of the main outputs of the research project, or to know more about the team behind the efforts.

Click here to see the result of the 3-d modeling exercise after measuring up the informal settlement at Singareni Colony, Hyderabad. You will see that the materials of the houses have been reproduced in this model.

Click here to see the model of the government-built housing (VAMBAY Scheme) at Singareni Colony. Please note that this is not the full extent of the government-built housing but only a sample 3 buildings. This is due to technical limitations of hosting large models online.

Click here to see the data dashboard summarizing temperature, humidity, rain, wind and several other parameters, with data from houses and weather stations in Singareni Colony and Bholakpur, Hyderabad.

Click here to view some ideas and suggestions for heat mitigation in buildings in informal settlements. The link leads to an English version, but there is a Telugu version we made for the community as well.

Click here to find out more about the team that has been part of this project.


Blog Posts on the Research Project and its Findings

Click on the tiles below to see learn more about the location and history of Singareni Colony, our respondents and methods, as well as some of the key findings from the research. These post have been authored by various researchers who have been part of the project.


Tags

3d modeling (1) Augmented Reality (AR) (1) Building information modeling (BIM) (1) climate data (4) design (1) dwc (1) gender (1) heat gain (2) heat perception (7) housing (6) hyderabad (10) informal settlements (11) informal work (1) instruments (1) simulation (1) singareni colony (12) spatial history (1) technology transformation (1) thermal comfort (2) urban heat (9)