ing that threshold via rapid and large-scale reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2021).

Hernandez then introduced the two speakers for this session addressing climate change–related displacement and the resilience of certain communities, neighborhoods, and places to climate change impacts: Eric Klinenberg, professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, and Vivek Shandas, professor of climate adaptation and director of the Sustaining Urban Places Research Lab at Portland State University. Hernandez invited both speakers to share an anecdote that motivates their work. Klinenberg shared he is speaking from historical Lenape land in New York City and “grew up in one of America’s most famously divided cities,” Chicago. He described how Chicago is a city marked with places that feel like home and others often called “no-go” areas, meaning that spatial segregation organized his life “in ways that I still have to work hard to come to terms with.” He

said these early experiences motivated his research on issues of climate, health, and the physical makeup of the places people live. Shandas noted he is in Portland, Oregon, on the traditional and current homelands of the Tualitin, Klackameth, Tillamok, Kalaypuya, Multnomah, Tumwater, and Watlala band of the Chinook, along with the many other tribes that live along the Columbia River. He shared his story of migration from where he was born, in South India, to Northern California, and how grappling with and trying to reconcile the resulting “transformations of culture, of food, of friendships, of family” has been a lesson in understanding privilege and the other as he tries to integrate his own scholarship and identity “within a culture that is in rapid transformation.”

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Klinenberg began his remarks by introducing his book, Palaces for the People, which is about social infrastructure and how investing in it can help address “a variety of things we care about,” including inequality, politics, and climate change (Klinenberg, 2018). He also noted that “the significance of place and displacement is not just about what happens after climate change”; the vulnerability place and displacement produce also impact how people experience climate change and many other things.

Klinenberg shared that he learned this lesson early in studying his home city of Chicago for his dissertation. He said Chicago gets very hot in the summer and is getting hotter and more humid over time, with heat waves lasting longer and becoming more dangerous. He explained how cities heating up can be dangerous due to the extent of development, asphalt, and steel, along with pollution, which traps heat and results in what climate scholars call urban heat islands.¹ Klinenberg described how it is increasingly difficult for those who live in cities to get relief from the heat without air conditioning. He went on to describe the summer of 1995 in Chicago, when the heat index exceeded 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Though the heat wave lasted only a few days, he said “the city began to break down” afterwards, with massive fatalities due to faltering infrastructure, including malfunctioning power plants and substations. Losing power also meant losing elevators, losing water (including as a result of people opening up fire hydrants in an attempt to keep cool in the absence of air conditioning), failing transit lines, bridges not opening and closing neatly, and so forth. All of this in turn led to excess sickness and death and overwhelmed emergency rooms, which Klinenberg noted paralleled recent experiences with the pandemic. In light of what happened in Chicago in 1995, Klinenberg asked those listening to consider how well

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¹ See for example https://urbanclimate.gatech.edu/ (accessed January 10, 2023).

the place they currently reside is prepared for the kind of heat communities will experience moving forward, including whether the power grid, transit system, and water system are adequate, and which people and places have easy access to hospitals and doctors.

He then described how he used a traditional sociological research method, drawing maps of different neighborhoods, to understand who died and where they died in the wake of the 1995 heat wave in Chicago. Klinenberg noticed that the neighborhoods on the West Side and South Side of Chicago—historically segregated, Black, and low-income areas—fared much worse than the average Chicago neighborhood. He noted that while this was politically important, scientifically, this was not puzzling; rather, it was obvious that everyday vulnerabilities and inequalities would translate into inequalities when it comes to extreme events. The scientific puzzle here, Klinenberg said, is a sociological one: “Why is it that we know this in advance and fail to do something about it?”

Klinenberg then described something else he noted in these maps: among the neighborhoods with the lowest death rates—the places that were most resilient—a number of those were also poor, Black, and segregated, and in many cases, “literally across the street” from neighborhoods with some of the highest death rates. So while race and poverty and segregation are part of the story, Klinenberg said, “we need to get more granular and specific scientifically to understand how places operate.” He noticed that in Chicago “there are two kinds of very poor places and they work differently.” For example, one set of poor, Black and Brown, segregated neighborhoods with a depleted infrastructure, such as having lost significant population, housing, businesses, and retail, lead to “empty lots with weeds and detritus and broken glass,” and abandoned buildings. As a result, people, especially those who may be disabled, become socially isolated. In a similar segregated neighborhood that has a social infrastructure that is intact—such as sidewalks, stoops where people congregate, a flourishing retail sector, public institutions like libraries, and community organizations that can be supported—people are unlikely to die in a heat wave compared to the other neighborhood because the social infrastructure of the neighborhood brings people into the public where they are more likely to experience supportive interactions, both daily and in crises. Klinenberg shared an example of how the residents of Englewood were ten times more likely to die due to the Chicago heat wave and have a shorter life expectancy than those in Auburn Gresham, just across the street. Klinenberg attributed these differences to social infrastructure, “physical places that shape how people interact,” and noted that when people invest and maintain this infrastructure, there is a positive effect on the social life, health, and well-being.

Klinenberg concluded by sharing the work he did in New York City after Hurricane Sandy, as research director for the Rebuild by Design

competition, working with teams of engineers, architects, landscape designers, and climate scientists. In this competition, he said, “groups were trying to grapple with what it means to protect a place where the seas are rising, where it is getting hotter at a dramatic pace”—something every community across the world is facing. He noted that even in New York City, a place with extraordinary wealth, scientific expertise, and political will, the number of actions that would need to be taken to deal with displacement risks are overwhelming. Klinenberg said the question for cities and countries around the world is, “How do you do enough mitigation so that you can make adaptation and protection of vulnerable people and places possible?” He said mitigation, converting to renewable energy and stopping the burning of greenhouse gases, needs to happen as soon as possible, but “then we face this question … how are we going to make a decision about which people and places get the resources they need to protect themselves and how are we going to decide which places we are going to abandon?” He noted this question raises many other questions about power, inequality, hierarchy, and expertise—who and what are being valued. Klinenberg said one of the key challenges of this era is going to be seeing spatial justice both in historical context and “with the capacity to project forward.” He shared the example of how President Obama made the decision to fund protection in the Lower East Side as part of the Rebuild by Design project,² focusing on an area with a lot of poverty and public housing, and how his successor would probably not have prioritized spending the same way. Leadership and political decisions matter in this work that is just beginning, Klinenberg stated in closing.

ADVANCING A COMMUNITY-BASED PARTICIPATORY CLIMATE SCIENCE: THE CASE OF URBAN HEAT

Shandas opened by noting Klinenberg’s pioneering work in spatial inequity and how it has been at the foundation of some of the work in the field, including that of Shandas’s research group. Shandas also shared that as a sociospatial scientist, he is looking at empirical ways of describing various patterns discussed during this workshop—not only spatial injustices, but also the themes of marginalization, erasure, and dispossession that were raised during the keynote addresses. He said his presentation about community-based participatory climate science is about taking climate science from this technical, scientific question and “then bringing it into the hands of the people and trying to understand it through

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² See https://rebuildbydesign.org/work/funded-projects/the-big-u/ (accessed January 10, 2023).

these distributional inequities that are emerging as we speak.” Shandas described growing up in South India and the ecologies of place he experienced, “the way in which the trees, the cows, the chickens, the monkeys that lived right next door to our apartment complex were constantly in and around us,” enabling him to see that this space is shared with not only other humans, but also other species. He then described the very different experience of the landscapes in Northern California, to where his family immigrated, landscapes which were “far more clearly delineated in the sense of where people were allowed to be, where cars were allowed to be, where bikers and rollers were allowed to be.” Shandas shared that his parents’ names both include initials representing the houses where they were born, an indication of how much house and place matter when it comes to understanding where one is from.

He went on to describe his work as a sociospatial urban ecologist, drawing on “theories of social marginalization, adaptive management, and community resilience to identify the ways in which historical and current-day policy structures generate distributional injustices.” He added that while he does not privilege urban areas, focusing on them allows him to study landscape transformation, power sharing, and centers of cultural diversity, enabling a conversation about the implications of local decisions. Shandas noted his research focuses on climate-induced extreme events as a “way for understanding social and spatial structures in urban areas and how those amplify or create a distribution of benefits and burdens across the landscape.”

He then shared more about his work advancing community-based participatory climate science, which he said is about reconciling different landscapes and how they distribute their infrastructure, grounded in questions of spatial justice. Shandas described how he and his colleagues are trying to get communities to go out and collect temperature measurements, engaging in the definition, design, interpretation, and application of the results to address urban heat, which kills more people than any other natural disaster, with the possible exception of the pandemic. He said they equip communities with sensitive research-grade thermometers that display temperature, humidity, and a few other measurements, and that these community members are trained in this approach and collect measurements. This leads to collecting tens of thousands of measurements in each place, which offers a way to examine this at scale across the country.

Shandas noted that with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he and his team have worked with communities in cities around the country and worldwide to collect such temperature measurements. He shared maps from work his team has done in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, noting that collecting these

measurements enables a hyperlocal, high-resolution view of the temperature in a specific location during a specific time frame, capturing variations by street, neighborhood, and time of day. Shandas mentioned they found consistent patterns whereby communities living in the hottest areas within Portland were those with less formal education, limited English proficiency, higher levels of racial diversity, and extreme poverty. Central air conditioning was more common in white-identified communities, whereas access to public health heat refuges was lower for Asian and older adults. These patterns, Shandas added, are not unique to Portland, but are seen in cities all around the country. When he asked others why these patterns exist, Shandas often heard people mention the “luxury effect”—that those with the resources can plant trees, create shade, and curate a landscape that reduces the effects of heat in their neighborhood. But he and others found this explanation “deeply unsatisfying” and wanted to examine more systemic underpinnings of these patterns.

As Shandas and colleagues deepened their inquiry, they examined the way federal planning decisions made in the 1930s—particularly redlining—affected U.S. cities. Redlining, which codified previously existing segregation policies and set neighborhood grades such that some neighborhoods would have more limited access to home mortgages, was done in more than 200 cities across the country. Using digitized maps of redlining from the University of Richmond, Shandas and colleagues examined 108 cities and discovered patterns in current-day land cover and temperatures based on these historic redlining grades: A-grade neighborhoods across the country had more tree canopy, while C- and D-grade neighborhoods were more likely to have housing projects, industrial facilities, big-box stores, and big highway projects, the latter a result of deliberate and conscious planning actions in the 1950s, putting highways through redlined areas of cities (Hoffman et al., 2020). Shandas mentioned the “long shadow” of redlining policy, which was stopped in 1968 through the Fair Housing Act, yet continues to impact what is seen in each of these neighborhoods today. He also noted that, of the cities they examined, the city where he lived, Portland, Oregon, ranked number one in terms of current-day temperature differences between redlined and greenlined neighborhoods, with an almost 13-degree Fahrenheit difference. In addition to temperature differences, Shandas and his team have found more population growth—which suggests large housing infrastructure projects—in C and D neighborhoods than in A and B neighborhoods in West Coast cities (see Figure 3-1). They have also found more greening efforts, including tree plantings and creating parks and open space as a means of reducing temperatures, in A and B neighborhoods in Philadelphia, even in the past 30 years. However, in Portland, planting shifted more to C and D neighborhoods around 2004.

neighborhood-scale engagement campaigns centering on current needs and sharing power are needed.

DISCUSSION

Hernandez opened the discussion with an audience comment noting that social infrastructure buffers the impact of many disasters, climate or otherwise, and asked the panelists to comment on how governmental agencies integrate this awareness. Klinenberg responded that he was delighted to see infrastructure gain traction in the federal policy debate about how the nation invests and rebuilds, though the term has sometimes been used more expansively than he conceptualizes. For instance, he said, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg advocates for social infrastructure as a planning tool and investment strategy. Given that the concept is new to the American political vocabulary, Klinenberg noted, “in some ways, it is an uphill battle for it to gain traction to really work right now.” However, he acknowledged, it does seem possible there will be investments in libraries, parks, and playgrounds that recognize climate protection plans can be implemented with social infrastructure in mind. Achieving multiple benefits from all efforts (e.g., expanding a flood wall at the top to serve as a bike or running path) is a tenet of effective climate design that offers multiple benefits. Klinenberg said the issue that remains is, even if the nation does invest in social infrastructure, who gets it and who does not? How will the politics of inequality shape those decisions? And how can the political will to produce equity in social policy be mustered?

Shandas added that during the massive heat event that killed nearly a thousand people in the Pacific Northwest in summer 2021, similarly to Chicago in 1995, there was a lack of capacity among government agencies to do the outreach and engagement necessary “to get in front of a climate-induced event.” Government agencies mobilized only as temperatures were already spiking in the region and tried to open shelters and reach out to trailer home parks, mobile marks, and multifamily residential homes. Shandas graded the response a C minus at best, saying the effort “to get out and engage the communities that we know are going to be hit hardest was remarkably limited … regardless of the 26 years of very well documented social autopsy that we have had from [Klinenberg’s] and other … work.”

Hernandez next posed a question to Shandas with respect to his CBPR methods, and the thinking about how to engage underrepresented people who have not been engaged in that type of research before. Shandas noted philanthropic organizations are now putting forward resources to support CBPR, citing the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s recent “people,

parks, and power” solicitation³ and his own philanthropically funded work with the Asian Pacific Islander Network of Oregon,⁴ “a culturally-based organization that has real deep connections to not only a place, but also a set of cultures as well as identities.” Shandas noted they are engaging that community and sharing power with organizations in order to help design research and build the knowledge base. He described one example of this work, evaluating how a tree planting initiative over the past 15 years has influenced displacement and social dynamics of the community, using empirical data combined with local knowledge to inform negotiations with planners who are moving to change neighborhoods very quickly.⁵

Hernandez then posed a question from the audience about whether there are datasets that identify elderly, low-income people living alone so that interventions can be neighborhood and individual based. Klinenberg responded that there is wide variation in how cities handle populations known to be vulnerable to extreme weather events, with some cities compiling their own lists (e.g., of older people who are alone or frail and need support) and other cities that express privacy concerns and say they will not reach out unless people volunteer and opt in to be contacted. He added that he thinks more collaborative, creative, and proactive efforts in this space are needed, building relationships between civic groups, citizen groups, and local and state governments. He also expressed concerns about how COVID has brought to light the deep distrust of government, public health authorities, and others who may not share the same views that exist in some places, and how that has made it more difficult to provide essential services such as vaccination. Klinenberg noted there is no vaccine for climate change, and the interventions required to respond to it will be even more elaborate and challenging than a vaccination campaign. He said that sociological research that suggests there is no extreme event big enough to change everyone’s attitudes around climate change speaks to the deep behavioral science challenges in addressing these issues. He concluded his response by noting, “We cannot just segregate the world of climate science and climate risk from the world of COVID science and COVID risk from the world of social and behavioral sciences. We have to find some way of integrating those conversations.”

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³ More information on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s “People, Parks, and Power” initiative, led by Prevention Institute, can be found here: https://www.preventioninstitute.org/projects/people-parks-and-power (accessed January 18, 2022).

⁴ More information on the Asian Pacific Islander Network of Oregon can be found here: https://www.apano.org/ (accessed January 18, 2022).

⁵ See for more information https://www.rjpetteway.com/research/trees-health-climate-change-in-underserved-communities (accessed January 10, 2023).

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⁶ More information on the Stop Line 3 action can be found at https://www.stopline3.org/take-action (accessed January 18, 2022).

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