Bengaluru, home to 14 million people, is grappling with climate challenges such as heatwaves, droughts, and floods, which are increasingly affecting daily life and livelihoods. The majority of the metropolitan area is exposed to these shifting environmental conditions.
In 2024, with support from the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) through the #Art4Resilience: Knowledge Into Use Awards grant, Socratus set out to reimagine resilience in the city, moving beyond adaptation and coping strategies toward unlocking transformative capacity. The project aims to foster deeper engagement on urban resilience and address gaps in defining and valuing resilience strategies.
With GRP’s support and collaboration with key partners, Socratus has made significant progress. Current efforts focus on working with artists to translate insights into creative expressions using Climate Recipes—a collection of lived, tested practices shared as “recipes” that reimagine how we adapt to climate change by drawing on ancestral knowledge, environmental wisdom, and everyday cultural practices.
Manasi Pingle, Bengaluru Sustainability Forum
Partnership with the Bengaluru Sustainability Forum (BSF)
The Bengaluru Sustainability Forum (BSF) is a multi-institutional initiative addressing urban and peri-urban sustainability issues. It facilitates interdisciplinary collaborations among academics, researchers, practitioners, social advocates, and citizens. BSF’s engagements range from workshops and exhibitions to film festivals and podcasts. In mid-2024, Socratus partnered with BSF to co-design and facilitate a series of Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) under their ‘Climate Charche’ initiative, exploring how climate change intersects with urban systems and affects communities directly.
By February 2025, eight Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) had been conducted with diverse communities in Bengaluru, focusing on those often excluded from formal city planning. Participants were selected based on geography, gender, and occupation, ensuring a broad representation of experiences. Water was chosen as the central theme due to its critical role in shaping climate challenges and access to essential resources. The discussions engaged women from slums, intra-state migrant workers, gig workers in food delivery, pourakarmikas responsible for waste management and cleanliness, ASHA workers serving as frontline health responders, women street vendors, domestic workers, and residents of flood-affected settlements. Each group shared their unique struggles and strategies for navigating the changing climate, shedding light on how different communities experience and respond to environmental shifts in the city.
Sama Foundation
Living on the frontlines of climate change
The stories that emerged from these discussions reveal how climate change is shaping daily life across Bengaluru. Women in older slums face unreliable water supply and poor drainage, disrupting their work, health, and routines. Migrant workers, having moved from drought-stricken rural areas, now struggle with insecure housing and limited government support on the city’s industrial fringes. Domestic workers endure long commutes and worsening floods, while gig workers adjust their schedules to escape extreme heat, sometimes relying on unconventional methods to predict weather patterns. Street vendors see their incomes shrink as heatwaves and sudden rains deter customers and ruin perishable goods. ASHA health workers navigate flooded streets and rising disease outbreaks, balancing their frontline roles with personal hardships. Pourakarmikas, responsible for maintaining public spaces, continue to fight for job security and adequate housing, even as they rebuild their flood-damaged settlements. In low-lying informal neighbourhoods, worsening floods and poor waste management clog drainage systems, with plastic waste compounding public health risks. Despite these struggles, each group demonstrated resilience, adapting in ways that underscore both the need for systemic change and the resourcefulness of those most affected by climate impacts.
Manasi Pingle, Bengaluru Sustainability Forum
Looking ahead
The next phase of this project will transform these insights into artistic expressions that make resilience strategies more visible and actionable. Through Climate Recipes, artists will collaborate with communities to create compelling narratives and visuals capturing their lived experiences and aspirations. These artistic outputs will communicate resilience challenges and solutions to a wider audience, including policymakers and urban planners.
With GRP’s continued support, Socratus remains committed to using art as a tool for urban resilience. By centering community voices and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations, this initiative seeks to shift Bengaluru’s resilience narrative from reactive adaptation to transformative change. As the project progresses, these efforts aim to not only enhance local resilience but also inspire similar approaches in other cities facing climate challenges.