RiskSense

Citizens are already a distributed risk-sensing infrastructure for their own cities — noticing the weak signals, adapting under stress, long before an institution names something a crisis. RiskSense starts from that premise and tries to build the tools that let the noticing add up to something.

The problem

Systemic risk rarely announces itself as a single event. It cascades — a heatwave feeding a power failure feeding a water shortage — faster than most civic institutions are built to track, let alone act on collectively. RiskSense treats this as an infrastructure gap: not a lack of data, but a lack of shared legibility at the scale where people actually live.

What I built

As Civic Tech Lead, I design, build, and hold the digital infrastructure behind RiskSense — working across four layers: Learning (Risk Clinics for community deliberation), Legibility (tools for visualising compound risk), Intelligence (foresight capability), and Intervention (the infrastructure to act on what’s found). The aim throughout is to make civic risk intelligence something communities can hold and act on themselves, not something delivered to them.

Where it landed

Piloted with the first Mumbai Citizen Risk Clinic — a participatory workshop built on 2025–26’s climate year, when a heatwave-and-flood cycle pushed the city’s systems close to their limit. Stewarded by Dark Matter Labs, with Siddhi Ashar, Prateek Shankar, Anahat Kaur, and Sofia Valentini across Mumbai, Berlin, and São Paulo.