CAREER: Thermal Inequality, Health, and the Built Environment

Exposure to heat has been described as a major index of climate-related inequality. Heat is a particular problem for those who live in cities, which are typically hotter than non-urban areas, largely due to the role of the built environment in retaining heat. Exposure to heat can contribute to a range of health issues and can even lead to death.

This project aims to contribute an understanding of how the ordinary experience of heat might be translated into expert conversations about urban climate that in turn contribute to shaping policies about how we live in cities. The project also has a significant educational component that involves establishing a pipeline to train the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists, scholars, and policy makers.

This educational component includes developing climate-focused curricular enrichment modules for school-age children and an undergraduate Heat Lab through which students will learn to conduct interdisciplinary research. The data generated through this research will be shared to inform and advance policy related to urban heat mitigation and adaptation.

With the support of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the researcher will undertake a five-year study of the relationship between urban heat, bodies, and the built environment. Many generalized measures of heat response in urban environments suffer from sampling biases that make them less equipped to explain variability across different urban contexts.

This project focuses on how experiences of heat are potentially shaped by the interaction of history, culture, and the built environment. It employs a mixed-methods approach, including ethnography, oral histories, archival research, and GIS-based mapping. The layering of these multiple forms of data will offer a more robust understanding of how the experience of urban heat is shaped by both environmental and cultural factors, as well as provide a more experience-near perspective on these factors that shape the distribution of thermal exposure.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.