Citizens know it. Almost no one names it. Half the city has lost the shared infrastructure that would help. And in one belt, Govandi–Mankhurd, heat has stopped being a discomfort and become the texture of despair. Every chart below is interactive: hover, tap, explore.
Only 0.8% answered “don’t know” on heat, the lowest of any indicator. No awareness campaign needed; citizens know.
Long-tenured Govandi residents: 87% say summer is strongly unliveable. Newcomers elsewhere: 26%. A 3.3× gap.
In heat-trap localities, fewer than 1 in 100 residents name heat when asked what is wrong. The vocabulary gap comes before the action gap.
Heat has the smallest “don’t know” rate and the lowest score of all 17 indicators. Hover any bar.
Strong-disagreement on heat climbs steadily with years of residence. Long memory is a record of decline, not nostalgia.
Asked openly what is wrong with their area, heat-trap residents name garbage, roads, water. Heat itself: 10 mentions among 1,366 residents.
Cleanliness has a vocabulary: BMC, dustbins, swachh. Heat has none. There is no civic phrase yet for a shaded corridor or a public cooling room. Naming heat is itself the first intervention, and it is measurable: re-survey and watch the naming rate move.
“If I had a superpower, first and foremost I would try to reduce the intensity of the sunrays so that I and the others won’t sweat much.”
Heat correlates strongly with everything collective (water, waste, climate, green cover, mental-health support) and barely at all with private or community-internal strengths (belonging, enterprise, hope). That is the statistical signature of a commons failure: you cannot fix it with a fan.
A locality is in refuge collapse when summer is unliveable AND its outdoor escapes (green cover, public space) are broken too. Hover a locality for all three scores.
Every dot is a heat-trap locality, sized by responses. Drag to zoom; hover for scores. All seven localities below the hope line are in one belt.
Where heat, commons failure, refuge collapse and voicelessness coincide, hope goes. It is geographically bounded and it has a name: the Govandi–Mankhurd belt. Citywide heat policy that does not treat this belt separately will fail it.
The OpenCity / Citizen Matters Heat Data Jam (Maharashtra Climate Cell, Climate Group, C40, WRI India, St. Xavier’s) modelled M/East with satellite data: bastis suffer most, and built-volume-to-vegetation explains 85% of within-ward temperature variance. This survey reaches the same diagnosis from the street: a publishable cross-validation.
Mumbai: MCAP/BMC (cool roofs, Marol urban forest, climate-resilient streets) · HeatWatch India (worker-focused organising) · cBalance (passive cooling for informal housing) · IIT-B CSRE (surface-temperature research). India: Ahmedabad HAP (the template, ~2,300 lives) · Mahila Housing Trust (20,000+ cool roofs, women-led) · Telangana Cool Roof Policy · CEEW (warm nights rising faster than hot days) · WRI Cool Cities Lab.
1. Publish this refuge-collapse list as a named civic artefact. 2. Run heat-naming workshops in those 15 localities and measure the naming rate. 3. Treat Govandi as a separate flagship, co-designed with local CBOs. 4. Add occupational heat, night heat, and refuge access to the next Quotient. 5. Take the demand-side case to WRI’s Keep Cool challenge. 6. Bring the citizen data to the Heat Data Jam coalition rather than build a new one.
Method: heat-trap = locality (n≥15) where 75%+ disagree summer is liveable. Naming detection uses word-boundary matching, corrected 12 June 2026; earlier versions of this page said 6%, the corrected figure is 0.7%. All figures recomputed from the full 5 July 2026 CSV.