Spatial Justice as a Driver of Health in the Context of Societal Emergencies Proceedings of a Workshop (2023) / Chapter Skim
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3 Climate Change Displacement and Population Resilience
3 Climate Change Displacement and Population Resilience
Pages 19-30
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From page 19... ...
Alejandra Hernandez, a Kresge Foundation Environment Fellow, opened this panel from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, acknowledging the tradi tional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homelands on which the city is situated, and where the people of Wisconsin's sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations remain present. She noted the previous panel "grounded us in the his tory of forced and unjust displacement in this country" and explored how healing of the land and the people are intertwined.
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From page 20... ...
• While the impact of extreme weather events like heat waves fall disproportion ately on segregated, Black, and poor neighborhoods, some of these neighbor hoods are particularly resilient; this is a result of strong social infrastructure (i.e., the physical places that shape how people interact) , including sidewalks, stoops where people congregate, a flourishing retail sector, public institutions like libraries that work well, and community organizations that can be sup ported.
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From page 21... ...
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)
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From page 22... ...
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.
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From page 23... ...
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.
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From page 24... ...
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.
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From page 25... ...
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)
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From page 26... ...
Shandas noted these historic patterns illustrate where inequities are playing out and that if the driving principle behind interventions is that all individuals have the right to be protected from climate-induced events, then interventions should begin with communities experiencing the most acute harms. He also suggested that "if we are shifting the burden of proof away from individuals and to systemic processes … then the processes, organizational policies, management practices that center historically marginalized communities will need to be another lens through which we think about spatial justice." Shandas encouraged everyone to think about "adopting a public health model of prevention as a preferred strategy to eliminate the threat before it occurs," in this case considering what can be done to reduce the effects of climate change on the public's health.
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From page 27... ...
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 climateinduced 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]
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From page 28... ...
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." 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)
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From page 29... ...
On the one hand, "You could see a very dark future for us," and on the other, the possibilities for doing good are so clear. While "there are real burdens to being alive at this moment … the opportunity is that we have a chance to do something." Shandas added that the ideas from the keynote panel regarding breaking the connection of people from the land is what he is seeing play out with climate change as well, both in terms of the current-day, direct impacts of sea-level rise and other extreme weather, as well as how historical separation of people from their land has led to many of the patterns of climate-related effects seen today.
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