The project aims to mitigate the disproportionate impact of heat stress in urban poor settlements through inclusive planning. It brings together the habitat planning capacities of Integrated Design and community mobilization capacities of Mahila Housing Trust to generate a community-based climate action plan that identifies household, settlement and settlement-city scale innovations. The approach responds to heat stress as not just a consequence of settlement characteristic but a manifestation of unequal and unplanned urbanization.

Through a process of co-creation, innovative interventions will be evolved at multiple scales: green technologies at household scale, open space design at the settlement scale and decentralized resource management at the settlement-city scale. By foregrounding local knowledge, capacities, imperatives and priorities, the community-based climate action plan will present bottom-up processes as supplements or counters to city and ward-scale formal planning processes. The project is supported by Elrha.