Who Gets to Stay Cool?
Spatial Inequality in Urban Heat Mitigation across Delhi
Presented at the LivedHeat Symposium 2026, IIT Delhi and TU Delft, New Delhi
The Problem
Delhi's urban heat island effect is well documented. What is far less examined is who bears the cost of it. Official narratives celebrate Delhi's green cover. What they do not account for is how that greenery — and the cooling it provides — is distributed across the city's radically unequal settlement geography.
This project asks a simple but politically charged question: who gets to stay cool in Delhi, and who does not?
Approach
The study combines two empirical threads that urban heat research typically keeps separate: ecosystem service distribution and socioeconomic vulnerability.
The InVEST Urban Cooling Model was used to quantify the spatial distribution of heat mitigation benefits across Delhi's settlement typologies — planned colonies, unauthorised colonies, urban villages, JJ clusters, and regularised resettlements. Model outputs were combined with Fair Price Shop (FPS) beneficiary data as a proxy for food insecurity and economic marginalisation, using a multiplicative composite raster to identify zones of compound vulnerability.
Spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I) and Gi* hotspot analysis were used to identify statistically significant clusters of high cooling deficit coinciding with high vulnerability populations.
Key Finding
Informal settlements face a systematic cooling deficit relative to planned areas. The Northwest Delhi corridor emerges as the primary compound vulnerability zone — where thermal deprivation and food insecurity overlap at scale, affecting millions of residents who have the least capacity to adapt privately (air conditioning, relocation) and the least political leverage to demand public intervention.
The finding reframes urban heat not as a climate problem with technical solutions but as a governance problem with distributional consequences.
Significance
This is not simply a paper about heat. It is an argument that the distribution of urban cooling is a justice issue — shaped by decades of planning decisions about which settlements receive green infrastructure investment, which receive regularisation, and which remain in legal and spatial limbo. Heat vulnerability in Delhi is not random. It is structured.
Status
Paper under development. Presented at LivedHeat Symposium 2026, IIT Delhi and TU Delft, New Delhi, May 2026.