Research

Community-Led Climate Planning

As the climate crisis looms, governments around the world are experimenting with community-led climate planning, however, little is known about who is leading such community-led efforts, what is meant by community, how ordinary community members are involved in planning processes, and how they are influencing planning decisions. Despite claims that community involvement improves planning processes and outcomes, in practice public participation is often perfunctory and, in the worst cases, can reproduce societal power hierarchies and resource asymmetries. My dissertation project (currently titled "Climate Justice in Practice") analyzes the potential for community-led planning to meaningfully empower impacted community stakeholders through a promising case study of California’s Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) Program. The TCC program is directing over $330 million for climate justice infrastructure investments in historically marginalized and economically disadvantaged communities across the state. Drawing on interview and document data, I analyze how impacted communities were involved in, and influenced, decisions about how to allocate multi-million dollar climate investments in three neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Building on theories of participatory planning and environmental and climate justice, my dissertation contributes to these literatures by critically analyzing the role and influence of community stakeholders involved in neighborhood-scale climate planning in Los Angeles. 

Questions


Housing Justice and Climate Adaptation

As cities around the world are taking bolder action to mitigate and adapt to climate change, a growing body of literature has emerged highlighting the potential for maladaptation when climate governance fails to account for existing social, economic and environmental inequities.  In Los Angeles, against the backdrop of an ever worsening housing crisis, recent efforts to develop building decarbonization policies has surfaced concerns about the potential impacts of these policies for low-income tenants and homeowners. In collaboration with colleagues in the UCLA Department of Sociology, I am mapping the ecosystem of actors involved in building decarbonization policymaking in Los Angeles to reveal how these simultaneous crises (climate and housing) are being understood and managed in relation to one another. 

Questions


Heat Vulnerability

Heat is widely recognized as a major urban planning challenge for cities contending with the impacts of climate change. Rising temperatures and more frequent heat waves can impact urban infrastructure and systems. Increasingly, it is also being recognized as a public health and social equity concern. Heat causes more deaths than any other climate-related disaster. The urban climate literature has shown conclusively that the way we design cities can impact how heat is stored and experienced. Cities are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat due to the urban heat island effect, which causes densely built urban spaces to trap more heat than surrounding areas.  There is a growing body of literature exploring the uneven impacts of climate change broadly, however, it is unclear how much, if any, of this research looks specifically at heat. As cities adopt heat management strategies to address the challenge heat, it is critical that they consider how existing vulnerabilities affect individuals’ and communities’ capacity to survive the heat. 

Questions

Publications


I have also previously researched and written about open government data, sustainability networks, and food trucks.