Heat Futures at 78°E

Collectively, reimagining how cities reorganise life, space, and care as rising heat reshapes urban life

Heat settles differently across South Asia

The seasons we once recognised are beginning to lose their edges, arriving early, lingering longer, and refusing to follow familiar patterns. Heat stretches into the rhythms of everyday life, shaping work hours, slowing movement, and redefining where comfort is possible. As temperatures climb, the unevenness of our urban systems becomes harder to ignore, revealing how access to cooling, secure housing and resilient infrastructure remains deeply unequal.

How might an interdisciplinary approach reframe how we understand, reimagine, and respond to heat futures through culture, systems, and everyday practice?

A collaborative project by Lagori Collective (India) and Good Life X (Sri Lanka), supported by the British Council’s Climate Futures: South Asia Programme.

Bringing together cohorts in Bengaluru and Colombo, the program opened a shared inquiry into how rising heat is already reshaping urban life, and what new forms of practice, collaboration and imagination might be needed as temperatures continue to rise.

Methodology

The program unfolded through four connected touchpoints across both cities.

During the course of this program, an interdisciplinary group of researchers, designers, artists, educators, movement practitioners and sustainability professionals worked directly with the question of how heat is felt, navigated and unevenly distributed across our cities. The project recognised that no single discipline holds the answers and the space encouraged participants to question assumptions, work through different ways of knowing, and build on each other’s thinking for new ideas to emerge.

Our Approach

The workshops unfolded as a shared inquiry in three phases

DISORIENTATION

Slowing down to understand how heat is actually lived. Participants unpacked how it shows up across different bodies, neighbourhoods and forms of work, from outdoor labour and public services to schools and homes. These conversations surfaced the tensions between infrastructure, housing, labour and ecology, allowing those frictions to guide where the work needed to go.

RECONSTRUCTION

Focusing on what lies ahead and anchored in Lagori's South Asian Futures Framework, the cohort imagined how heat issues might evolve in the future, what new relationships and rifts they could create, and how we might choose to respond. By identifying signals of how urban heat is evolving, unpacking their direct and indirect consequences, worldbuilding and making, the groups pushed our collective imaginaries of emerging challenges we can anticipate and respond to.

TRANSMISSION

Asking what can begin now and anchored in GLX's THRIVE model, participants recognised regenerative pathways that we can begin to rehearse today, understanding micro steps towards influencing the realities of the present, how to do it and whom to do it with, to build the futures we want to bring to life.

The Prototypes

Each prototype is an early proposition. They range from cooling commons and alternative care currencies to heat-responsive work systems and neighbourhood data tools. Each invites engagement, critique and iteration.

Together, they open up new pathways for experimentation, interdisciplinary collaboration and policy dialogue across Bengaluru and Colombo, pointing towards the kind of shifts that may be needed as heat increasingly shapes how urban life is organized across South Asia.

Aaram Mane

Heat Lexicon

Plant Buddies

Building Heat Tax

Where's the Neralu?

Actionable Heat Index

Seasonal Bathing Rituals

Care-Based Currency

HEAT FUTURES GRANT RECIPIENT

Classroom Crashout

An interactive 2-D video game that shows how rising heat affects children’s health and learning in classrooms.

Aligned by heat, connected by possibility

The project brings two South Asian cities into dialogue, offering a space for South-South learning. Colombo and Bengaluru sit at the crossroads of multiple tipping points: rising temperatures, shrinking green cover, and deepening infrastructural strain. 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.

Why Futures?

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.

PODCAST

Heat Futures in Conversation

Dilina Janadith & Anushka Maheshwary reflect on the growing reality of extreme urban heat and ask what it means to respond differently.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

A Lagori Collective &
Good Life X Initiative

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.