A series of in-person and online workshops for those who care about how we live, adapt, and respond to a warming world, where climate and inequality collide in everyday ways.

Aligned by heat, connected by possibility

Colombo and Bengaluru sit at the crossroads of multiple tipping points: rising temperatures, shrinking green cover, and deepening infrastructural strain. In both cities, the experience of urban heat goes beyond just environmental; it is social, economic, and spatial. Who feels the heat, and who gets to escape it, is shaped by long-standing patterns of exclusion. And yet, alongside these challenges, there are embedded forms of resilience: networks of care, creative responses, and everyday ingenuity that resist collapse.

Heat Futures at 78°E is not just a title, but also an anchor. 78° East Meridian is the longitudinal line that Colombo and Bengaluru sit on either side of, a subtle alignment that reminds us we are connected not just by climate risks, but by possibilities for shared learning, grounded strategies, and regionally rooted responses.

Futures Help Us Rethink the Present

Heat Futures at 78°E is guided by a core belief:  that meaningful climate action must begin not just with data or infrastructure, but with imagination. In a time of accelerating disruption, we need the capacity to think beyond crisis and to ask what else is possible, and who gets to shape it.

Futures thinking offers us that space. Not to predict the future, but to open it up and widen the range of possible and preferred futures we can imagine and work towards. It allows us to question default trajectories, inform our decisions in the present, and design for long-term, life-affirming changes.

As we imagine the many possible futures, there are also many approaches to futures thinking. Our approach is rooted in South Asian realities, drawing on ancestral knowledge, local adaptation practices, and culturally embedded forms of care, repair, resistance, and regeneration.

Our approach blends this grounded futures work with regenerative practices that move beyond sustainability toward replenishment of ecosystems, relationships, and ways of being. Through participatory workshops and collaborative tools, we will explore how diverse ways of knowing can shape more just and resilient urban responses to heat.

This is not a search for a singular future but an invitation to seed many, held collectively, and shaped in dialogue with place.

This project brings the South Asian two cities into dialogue, not just to compare, but to co-create. It offers a space for South-South learning, where responses to urban heat emerge from context, lived experience, and collaboration across disciplines, languages, and ways of knowing.

Lagori Collective is an interdisciplinary social research and design lab based in India, focused on advancing futures thinking and innovation across South Asia. Lagori’s work involves using culturally rooted, participatory, and speculative methodologies to address complex global challenges. 

Lagori also stewards a member-run community space in Bengaluru as an experiment in alternative economic models. It is an Index Node, part of a global network of non-extractive third spaces.

Good Life X (GLX), is an innovation and development catalyst, geared to build a new wave of life-enhancing initiatives in South Asia to catalyse a regenerative future . The company provides critical knowledge and expertise to rapidly advance the prospects of businesses, economies and human life with a deep focus on regeneration and innovation. 

GLX is  equipped with extensive experience and tested models created over the years in transforming and elevating sustainable local startups and SMEs and creating impactful programs to connect sciences, academia, arts and industries together. Across the GLX alumni are Sri Lankan entrepreneurs, innovators and creatives who are geared to scale the good and build a regenerative future which thrives with the planet.