The Cool Infrastructures project aims to understand all the ways in which heat plays a role in people’s lives. In particular, the project asks how people who live in informal settlements, whose location on the “grid” is tenuous, deal with, adapt to, and conceive of heat.

Questions and Data

In order to start answering these questions, the team decided that combining multiple methods would be the best way to capture all of the various facets and dimensions of the social life of heat. Broadly, there were a few things that the team focused on trying to capture:

Physical heat data

By recording actual heat and humidity data, we hoped to have a dataset that could be used to put other findings in context. We hoped to be able to tell the story of heat in more detail, with more granularity than is currently possible with available temperature data. Much of the weather and temperature data that is currently available is recorded at the level of a ward or neighbourhood. The team wanted to collect data at the level of the household or the street, so that we could establish some basic facts about temperature and thermal comfort within the homes of the people living in the settlement.

People’s perception of heat

One of the core parts of this study was to examine people’s perception of heat. Since comfort is necessarily a subjective fact, we decided that it would be useful to record how people perceived heat and their own bodily comfort in a variety of different situations. Perception of heat need not be understood as merely recording subjective feelings: in fact, the perception of heat could be treated as just as important a measure of heat as the physical measurement recorded by a digital temperature sensor.

Adaptation and mitigation strategies to respond to heat

Apart from the perception of heat, the other important facet we wanted to study was how people adapted to or mitigated the effects of extreme heat on their lives. We wanted to capture and record the techniques and technologies used by people to deal with ever-increasing levels of extreme heat in their surroundings. This could include mechanical technologies or even social ones.

The broader cultural and social understanding of life with heat

We also wanted to explore what role heat played in the lives of people living in informal settlements. Did heat play a role in major decisions, relating to housing? Did it make up one of the major priorities that people considered when it came to things like livelihood or living conditions? Were there smaller ways that people understood and expressed their relation to heat, perhaps through dressing or other cultural forms?

Tools and Methods

In order to capture these various dimensions of heat, the team used 4 major kinds of tools or methods, described below.

Temperature sensors and loggers

In order to capture temperature and humidity data at a household level, we deployed a number of sensors in our respondents’ houses. The selection of houses was made so as to include houses of different types: including kuccha, semi-pucca, and pucca, referring to the kinds of materials used in the construction of the house (tarpaulin, tin sheets, bamboo, brick, concrete, etc.) For each type, 4 houses were selected, and 2 sensors were placed in each house, in living areas and kitchens. The sensors were mounted on stands around 1.1 metres high, so as to record a temperature that a human would experience in that space. Data was recorded by the logger every 4 minutes, and our team collected data from the logger every 30 days.

In addition, some sensors were also installed outdoors, covered by a radiation shield, so as to record outdoor ambient temperature. They were placed outside some houses as well as in the shade of a large tree. These also logged data at a resolution of 4 minutes.

Apart from these sensors, an Automatic Weather Station (AWS) was installed at a height of 10 metres, to record air temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed, and barometric pressure, at a settlement scale. This data was logged every 12 minutes.

Using this data, we were able to understand the temperature not only of the city or neighbourhood, but at the level of an individual household, and indeed at the level of individual rooms within that house. This data can be correlated with the other data collected in order to tell a rich story about living with heat, and how factors like materials, orientation, and location can affect a household’s thermal comfort.

Please visit this link to read more about this data and to access the data dashboard.

Perception and Activity Survey

In addition to physical measurements of air temperature, we felt it was equally important to record peoples’ perception of heat. Since comfort and sensation are so subjective, we believed that recording how and what people felt was necessary to get a full picture of their situation, as recordings logged by a sensor may not correspond directly to peoples’ perception of heat, nor would it be useful to capture it in any kind of nuance.

The team prepared a Perception and Activity Survey Tool to capture peoples’ perceptions of heat in various situations. There were some key considerations that were taken into account when designing and implementing this tool:

• The tool was meant to be somewhat longitudinal, that is, it aimed to capture not just how people perceived heat and comfort on any given day, but how that changed over time, as the seasons changed.
• Perception of heat was linked to activities. The tool linked the activities that a respondent had performed to their perception of heat and comfort at the time of performing it.
• The tool also included a section on measures taken due to changes in weather, such as different behaviour relating to clothing, food, or activity.

The tool was conducted over 6 months, from February 2023 to July 2023. A total of 45 respondents were part of the study, although not all were present for the entire duration. Researchers met the respondents roughly every 2 weeks, and collected a new entry for each meeting. The tool included asking the respondent to recount all the activities they had conducted on the previous day, listed according to time. For each activity, they were asked: what the activity was; the location of performing it (indoor, outdoor, threshold); whether or not they felt hot, cold, dry, or sticky; and how comfortable they felt (on a 5-point scale). A section at the end of the survey asked respondents if there had been any changes in their behaviours regarding clothing, food, health, and activity

By collecting this data over several months, including the peak of the summer, this tool aimed to record how peoples comfort changed over time and in different conditions. By linking perception to activities, it can track the comfort level of a specific activity over time, and in different weather conditions. Additionally, it can track how behaviours change to respond to extreme weather events like heatwaves. By linking it to demographic and temperature data, rich stories can be told at very granular levels.

To read some of the analysis using this data, follow these links:

The Great Indian Kitchen: Narratives Around Cooking in Heat in Singareni Colony

The ‘Everyday Social Life’ of an Off-grid Basti

Sleep and Heat in the Off-grid City

A Spatial History of Singareni Colony, Hyderabad.

Interviews and Qualitative fieldwork

In addition to the tool, researchers also conducted interviews with several respondents. This included a small set of baseline socio-economic interviews, which were conducted to assess respondents’ demographic, educational, and financial status. This questionnaire also focused on access to infrastructure like water and electricity, as well as ownership of assets, both generally and specifically related to cooling (fans, coolers, ACs). Apart from this questionnaire, several interviews were conducted with Key Informants like local leaders, construction workers, masons, etc. Unstructured and semi-structured interviews were also conducted with respondents to gather a more nuanced understanding of their lives and conditions.

Limitations: Methods and Data

Although the data collected is highly detailed and quite broad, there are several limitations associated with it. For one, the difficulty of conducting longitudinal research becomes very apparent in a settlement without a strong core community. Relationships with respondents had to be maintained individually, which becomes difficult for a small team managing over 40 respondents. The specific placement of the sensors could not always be ensured, as people would naturally need to move them around over the course of time. Some respondents even moved houses during the duration of the survey. The Perception Tool was also highly laborious, as it required frequent follow-ups with respondents, who often found the robotic and monotonous nature of the questionnaire boring and unnatural. This meant that substantial labour was required of the researchers to gather data, as respondents did not speak lucidly or at length unless prompted.

Challenges and Positionality

Logistical challenges were present in a variety of forms, given that the field site was at least 25kms away, and that the fieldwork research team consisted only 5 people. Additionally, as the research was being conducted during the summer, there were several days of extreme heat where researchers either had to cut short the exposure in the sun, or to skip a day of fieldwork entirely. Often, community members would ask us why on earth we were walking around in the blazing sun in the mid-day in the midst of a heatwave. The positionality of the researchers was also a slight challenge to overcome: most were not Telugu-speaking, and there were both female and non-binary members in the team, which meant that, from a safety perspective, staying beyond dark at the site was often not possible – as urged by the community members themselves.

Reflections and Learnings

The research team has observed several reflections on our methods. In a way, the methods we used were quite experimental, as we devised several new tools and methodologies from scratch, since there was no specific template that we could reproduce. This naturally carries with it the risk that several shortcomings of the tools will slip through the researcher’s gaze. That said, we believe that the tools we devised are highly useful for conducting research on heat vulnerability in informal settlements, and we encourage other researchers to adapt and use these tools in their own research. Below are some of the reflections we have gathered over the months of conducting our fieldwork:

• Conducting longitudinal research is particularly challenging when the researchers are based far from the field site. This reduces the amount of time that the researcher can spend doing fieldwork, especially if the researchers have other responsibilities such as data cleaning, transcription, and literature review. It would be ideal to have a smaller team situated in the community who can conduct the repetitive collection of data with the Perception Tool. One possibility that can be explored is to train local youth in the community to conduct the tool. This has the benefit of imparting skills and increasing income for the youth, while also being more efficient, as they could find it easier to liaison with respondents, with whom they share several things in common. Team Cool Infrastructures did experiment with this method, but faced difficulties relating to logistics. However, with more time, we believe this method is feasible.
• The lack of a strong community organisation made interacting with respondents a good deal more challenging. It would be better to go through a community-run organisation, as this would enable access to people in the community at a collective forum, so that researchers do not have to repeatedly explain their reason for being in the community and for conducting the research. It will also have the benefit of identifying certain Key Informants in the community, who take on the role of local leaders. Of course, much like Singareni Colony, many settlements may not have a community-run organisation. That said, we would strongly recommend first checking to be sure if such an organisation exists before beginning data collection.

There are many more reflections and learnings from the methods that could be discussed. A more detailed description of one researcher’s experience and reflections from conducting fieldwork will be posted soon, so do watch this space!

On Method

The use of novel methods, the emphasis on longitudinally, and the attempt to marry quantitative and qualitative data has been an interesting and challenging exercise in research design. We believe that this particular combination of priorities and tools can lead to rich outcomes and stories. As the team did not have a reference point where something like this has been done before, we are sure there are many shortcomings in our data. However, as we work our way through the data, we are also confident that we will be able to tell many rich and interesting stories from the field. We also believe that other researchers, using our tools and experience, can replicate or modify our tools and tell stories of their own in sites of their own choosing.

The reality of a heating planet, along with the reality of the tenuous situations that much of the world lives in, requires methods that adapt to the questions and spaces that are being enquired into. We hope that our project is an early step in creating methods and perspectives through which to study the reality of heat. This is especially true for places where the big questions of cooling and carbon neutrality do not always apply in the same way as they do in the global North, or indeed in more formal settlements in our own countries and cities. New questions – and new ways of asking the same questions – demand new tools and methods. We hope that we have been able to stumble onto a few of these new methods for the many new questions that the coming years will demand.

To read analysis of the data collected using these methods, please browse the rest of the heatingcities.in website.

Research supporting this post was supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC), UK Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) for the project, Cool Infrastructures: Life with Heat in the Off-Grid City (Award No: ES/T008091/1).