Thermally resilient communities: creating a socio-technical collaborative response to extreme temperatures

Zoé Hamstead,Ariane Middel,David M Hondula,Saud Alkhaled,Nicholas Rajkovich,Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah,Paul Coseo

doi:10.5334/bc.15

Abstract

Extreme temperatures claim more lives than any other weather-related event, posing escalating socio-technical and governance challenges that few urban communities have addressed in a systematic, coordinated and comprehensive way. Scholars have only recently begun to investigate the granular scales at which distributions of thermal risk are produced, people’s individual subjective thermal experiences and environmental justice dimensions of the hazard. Advances in research pave the way for concomitant improvements in management and policies, but bridges are needed to connect the thermal vulnerability knowledge base with place-based protective practices that are climatically, politically and culturally appropriate. The research presented in this paper uses actor–network theory (ANT) to describe the planning phase framework of a socio-technical collaborative for managing thermal extremes. The Thermally Resilient Communities Collaborative (TRCC) is a framework for planning and test-bed design phases of a thermal management system. Drawing lessons from two case studies, the framework examines how socio-cognitive spaces for collaboration change with technical and policy disruptions, and provides a way to design experiments that test how technical and governance interventions can enable collective action around urban thermal management. Practice relevance Thermal extremes claim more lives than all other weather events and pose an escalating socio-technical challenge. Often the problem is exacerbated by lack of clarity about organizational responsibilities and coordination between local governmental departments or agencies. The TRCC framework can be used to understand current practices, identify data gaps and create opportunities to engage in cross-sectoral management. This approach engages actors in identifying built environments and societal practices that create hazardous indoor and outdoor thermal conditions, develops effective ways to convey microclimate information and peoples’ subjective thermal experiences to responders and prevention planners, and elevates experiences of marginalized communities. The TRCC describes how governance networks are harnessed to solve collective action problems by integrating new data, technology, and governance capacities. Two case studies indicate how this process was used to create capacities to protect vulnerable people from the impacts of extreme temperatures in two US cities: Tempe, Arizona, and Buffalo, New York.

Highlights

Thermal extremes pose an escalating socio-technical and governance challenge in cities across the globe
Through a planning phase inscription process, the researchers and practitioners co-developed a framework for managing thermal extremes (Figure 2). This process involved policy document review, pre-interviews, and forum engagement. These three data-collection and analysis processes were used (1) to understand the state of thermal management in Tempe and Buffalo; (2) to produce a Thermally-Resilient Communities Collaborative (TRCC) vision aligned across local government sectors; and (3) to use the vision to articulate technological and capacity-building scripts, which could serve as the backbone for designing a thermal management testbed
Policy document review and priority mapping Scripts that emerged from the policy document review and priority mapping analyses involved issues centered around: (1) shifts in the framing of thermal extreme impacts from personal responsibility to public quality of life and collective action; (2) building collaborative practices to bridge gaps in thermal management; and (3)

Summary

Introduction

Thermal extremes pose an escalating socio-technical and governance challenge in cities across the globe. Heat and cold have long been considered environmental hazards, it is only in recent decades that scholars have begun to focus more closely on the spatial scales at which distributions of thermal risk are produced, the subjectivity of people’s experiences with thermal (dis)comfort, and the multiple dimensions of vulnerability that relate to human physiology, the built environment, and social inequity. These scholarly advancements offer a knowledge base for more effectively reaching communities that are most at risk of temperature-related illness and death. It is proposed that actor–network theory (ANT) can inform the design of the social–material processes underlying thermal management and other socio-technical systems

Methods

Results

Conclusion