Urban Heat: Rising Temperatures as Critique in India's Air‐Conditioned City

Bengaluru's clement weather has long been a defining factor of the urban imaginary, earning it the title of India's naturally “air‐conditioned city.” Over the past three decades, escalating temperatures have changed the urban climate and challenged this understanding of the city. The “rising temperatures narrative” has become a common form of lament among native and long‐term middle‐class residents of Bengaluru (Bangalore). This narrative links hotter temperatures with the past three decades of rapid urbanization to critique uncontrolled urban growth and associated changes in the urban ecology. In telling a story about the effects of urbanization on local weather patterns, the rising temperatures narrative refuses the spatial and temporal effects of global climate change in favor of more locally and politically salient attributions. Yet the critique that this narrative generates is anchored in class‐specific experiences and historical relationships to the city. In its nostalgic descriptions of the city that came before, the rising temperatures narrative draws a line of distinction between “old” and “new” middle‐class residents of Bengaluru. The rising temperatures narrative thus exposes the ambiguities and complexities of middle‐class life in the rapidly developing city.