Photo: Sveta K
If Cities Could Speak
Divyanshi Vyas and Swati Surampally are researchers in If Cities Could Speak - a project investigating climate change and health across nine cities and four countries in the Global South, with a particular focus on heat stress and health in urban informal settlements.
If Cities Could Speak is a three-year research project organised around four interconnected components, each unpacking the impacts of climate change and health in vulnerable settlements across four countries in the Global South. The project speaks both across sites - drawing out common arguments - and within them, for analysis that is rooted in the specificities of place and community.
Central to the project is a commitment to diverse forms of knowledge and storytelling. Academic articles sit alongside narratives and stories; geo-spatial maps accompany long-form ethnographic writing; documentary films and photo essays show what audio segments make listeners hear. This plurality of ways of seeing, knowing, and communicating is not incidental - it is a core part of what makes the project genuinely interdisciplinary. Rigour, for the If Cities Could Speak team, is not the preserve of academic writing alone.
As the project unfolds, these varied outputs will continue to emerge from its four components. Visitors are invited to explore each component for a deeper sense of the work, and to follow the first storylines on the project blog.