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Accepted Paper:

Rising Temperatures as Social Critique in India's "Air Conditioned City"  
Camille Frazier (University of California, Los Angeles)

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines conversations about Bangalore’s weather as insight into popular conceptions of temporal and local specificities of rising temperatures. It considers how past weather patterns figure in political critiques of unbridled urbanization in a rapidly developing city in the global South.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers popular discourse among residents of Bangalore, India about rising temperatures as evidence of the city's failings in the form of unbridled urban expansion. Weather has long been central to imaginings of Bangalore as India's "Air Conditioned City," and its excellent weather and even-keel temperatures are well-known throughout the country and are often the first thing mentioned to describe the city. Among Bangalore residents, even those who are relative newcomers to the city, statements about the city's rising temperatures over the past few years have become a very common form of lament that sparks feelings of loss and regret about uncontrolled urban growth. The city's soaring summer temperatures are offered as proof that Bangalore has grown beyond its means, destroying the city's green cover and with it the idyllic weather that characterized the city of the past. Rather than positioning this shift within a larger conversation about climate change at the global level, it is most often the failings of an individual city, within a single generation, that are blamed for this change in weather. In this way, Bangalore's rising temperature is positioned as a visceral and also quantifiable form of urban transformation that is otherwise hard to describe and critique. This paper considers conversations about Bangalore's weather as insight into popular conceptions of temporal and local specificities of rising temperatures. It considers how memories of past weather patterns figure in politically charged statements about the present and future of a rapidly developing city in the global South.

Panel P02
Weathering Time Itself: multiple temporalities and the human scale of climate change
  Session 1