‘The Heat Tax: Women, Heritage and Mobility in Old Lahore’ by our Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab network member Anushey Tahir is an essay exploring heritage as vital climate infrastructure via the lens of gendered mobility.
In the essay, she presents the concept of a ‘gendered heat tax’, exploring how women’s mobility is already shaped by safety concerns, domestic obligations, and social expectations; inadequate heat-responsive infrastructure can compound those existing disadvantages.
Read more at the Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab project Substack here:
https://globalurbanheatmedialab.substack.com/p/the-heat-tax-women-heritage-and-mobility
Anushey Tahir is a 2026 Political Science graduate at LUMS (Lahore University of Management Sciences). Her thesis examined how shrine redevelopment reshapes access to and control over public and sacred urban space. As part of this URBAN HEAT Media Lab, she is exploring the relationship between heritage conservation in Lahore and urban heat. Rather than viewing heritage solely through the lens of conservation and modernisation, she also documents it as a form of climate infrastructure, highlighting how traditional urban design can contribute to more walkable, resilient, and thermally comfortable spaces, and what authorities can do to preserve this infrastructure, which seems to be weakening every passing year due to global warming and climate change.
The ‘Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab’ is an initiative supporting international and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, individual and collaborative research, awareness-shaping, and media creation regarding urban heat mitigation and adaptation.