Hot Takes by the UCLA Heat Lab
As global warming worsens, heat increasingly impacts people's daily lives - influencing health, behavior, and more. But, we often aren’t very conscious about heat and knowledge of it doesn’t get shared beyond academia and specialized fields. In every episode, our hosts engage different researchers, activists, or community members to share their work and how it can be applied in the real world.
Hot Takes by the UCLA Heat Lab
Ep 6 - Getting the Scoop on Metropolitan Heat with Dr. Kara Schlichting
This episode, join us as we learn more about heat through a sensorial and historical lens from our guest Dr. Kara Schlichting. Through her research, Dr. Schlichting delves into the individual’s experience with temperature through a holistic standpoint, particularly with how heat manifests in metropolitan areas. Highlighting her work with Melting Metropolis, a project which examines temperatures in the urban climates of New York, London, and Paris, Dr. Schlichting offers insight into the history of heat, as well as a hopeful perspective on warmer weather. Remember to stay cool, eat some ice cream, and stay tuned for our next episode. Recorded on Zoom, April 2024.
Check out shownotes here: https://tinyurl.com/hottakes6
Welcome to the Hot Takes Podcast by the UCLA Heat Lab. I'm your host, Jason Tuteja. And in this episode, Dr. Schlichting joins us to provide a tutorial glimpse of heat through a historical lens. The Hot Takes Podcast is brought to you by the hottest lab on campus, the UCLA Heat Lab, with production support from Chelsea Tran, Facy Tran, Corinna Brunn, Natalie Gersler, and Jason Tuteja. We are generously funded by the Green Initiative Fund, and you can email us at Hot TakesUCLA at gmail.com with any suggestions so we can work to improve your listening experience. Also, don't forget to give the podcast a rating on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and follow our Instagram at UCLA HeatLab. And so, without further ado, let's get into our conversation with Dr. Schlichting. Dr. Kara Murphy Schlichting is an associate professor of history at Queen's College at the City University of New York. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University, and her work in late 19th and 20th century American history sits at the intersection of urban and environmental history with a particular focus on New York City. She's also co-investigator on the Welcome Discovery Award project, Melting Metropolis: Everyday Histories of Heat and Health in London, New York, and Paris since 1945. She's joining us today to talk about her work as well as the importance of looking at heat through a historical and sensory perspective. Dr. Schlichting, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Hot Takes Podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, of course. And so it's podcast tradition to always start off with what we call a fire starter, which is basically one of your earliest memories involving heat. So can you give us your one of your earliest memories?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And so I grew up uh in the last century in suburban Connecticut, in like most people in the late 20th century, in a house that didn't have air conditioning. And in the summers, my mom would always make sure that my sister and I were home during the middle of the day when it was the hottest out to keep us from being sunburnt crisps. And when it got really hot, we'd keep all the lights out in the house and we would open all the windows, and almost every single room had a ceiling fan. And so my earliest memories of really hot days are being in the house in kind of like the afternoon, but it's still kind of dark, and the air is really circulating. And so, like a very much a sensory experience, which is going to go well with our conversation today of air kind of moving across the room. So if you've ever read The Great Gatsby, I think how Fitzgerald introduces Daisy and Jordan in the kind of the breeze, minus the Long Island Estate, minus the fancy white dresses, uh, and like more like Umbros and library books, but uh ceiling fans.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. And what a what a great transition um into the rest of our podcast. Um, so how exactly did you get into researching heat?
SPEAKER_01:So I came across heat accidentally when I was writing my first book, New York Recentered. And in that book, I was writing a chapter about how and why Long Island State Park Commission announces its park plan in for kind of Greater New York as a recreational hinterland for the island of Long Island, which is has two suburban counties and then two of the city's five boroughs, Queens and Brooklyn. And in the summer of 1925, there's a heat wave in the city of New York. And Governor Al Smith calls all of the um state legislatures back legislature back to Albany in uh the middle of the summer. It's a heat wave and uh they're not not actually in session, but he calls everybody back and he announces the plan for the state parks for Long Island. And in his speech, he says, we can't just leave like the dry, dusty highway to the regular people. The masses of New York City deserve access, particularly to beaches and cool parks, because in this heat wave, people are driving out of the city and camping on beaches, camping on private property, just anywhere that's cooler than their tenements. And in reading about the governor's speech, I was reading just all the coverage of the heat wave in the local newspapers. And uh the New York Times covered how at Borough Hall in Brooklyn, so in downtown Brooklyn at the subway station, people from nearby tenements were sleeping on the steps that lead down into the city subway to catch the artificial breeze of passing subway trains as they came into the station. And I was really struck by that because, you know, in the you know, 2020s, your goal was not to touch anything on the city subway, right? Like you don't want to lie down on the city subway steps. So I thought, how hot must someone's tenement apartment be to make them turn to sleeping in the subway stations? And that pushed me into thinking about heat as an aspect of the climate of the city.
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's that's actually really interesting. That's uh that's quite the answer. Um, I guess I'm curious, would you say the the governor or like like governors now have succeeded in this mission of bringing beaches and cool parks to the people of New York?
SPEAKER_01:It was a big fight in the 20s, and there is pushback on Long Island where folks in suburban counties are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not sure we want the uh hundreds of thousands of people who live in the city to come out and recreate here. So there is pushback about access to these suburban hinterland parks, but they are successful. And I argue in New York Recentered that it's a strategic play on Al Smith's part as governor, that he waits till everyone in New York City is really hot and is really going to embrace this idea of uh cool beaches and parkland to find kind of sensorial relief during a hot wave, as they call it in the early 20th century.
SPEAKER_00:That's that's actually uh that's that's a really interesting idea, especially I think today in the world of climate change, global warming. Like I wonder if other people are using like, oh, this is a great opportunity to push some policy that they've been wanting to push for a while. But yeah, let's with that being said, let's get into kind of the meat of the podcast. So here on Hot Takes, um, between various episodes, we always like to talk about these different ways of conceptualizing heat. And I think most often people tend to view heat under this lens of global warming. So this kind of contemporary event, this like rising of temperature numbers. Um, but a lot of your work, on the other hand, it looks at heat through this more historical and also sensory lens. Um, and so I guess can you tell us a little bit about this lens and what drew you to it?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And it it comes from the question, exactly how you phrased this question. Um, I was curious about how we could start to get the scales. Consider the different scales at which we tell environmental history, particularly climate um narratives in environmental history. Because um, you're right, we are registering climate change and global warming through scientific reports, through meteorological data. And we see that in the news, right? Where, for example, last summer 2023, uh, the hottest summer globally on record since humans started keeping meteorological data. So we know that that's one way to mark the climate crisis. But environmental history can offer us ways to think about heat and rising temperatures on many scales, right? Not just on the global, but we can come to uh all the way down to a community and to the body because we register heat, we register the atmospheric temperature around us through our bodies. And so for give you an example, right? When I go outside in the summer in New York City where I live, it's going to be really hot in July and August. We have high temperatures and the kicker is we have high humidity in the city. It's like 63% on average year-round, and it can get up higher. And the heat index, which combines temperature and humidity, tells us that that's really hard on our bodies and it makes high humidity, makes temperatures feel hotter. But when I go outside, I don't think to myself, oh, there's a high humidity today, and the heat admittance of this concrete uh in near the subway station is really high, and that the street and brick walls are going to absorb and store solar insulation, and the urban heat island effect is gonna be bad tonight. It's not how we think. We don't like thinking climatological data metrics like that. We think my hair is sticking to the back of my neck, my bag feels hot on my back, and the trash that is waiting for pickup smells. And so my experience with environment or my experience of climate as a part of my environment is bodily. And I figured that I could find a historical record of that type of environmental understanding through the body in the past as well.
SPEAKER_00:Could you speak more a bit on like what kind of records you're finding? Like is it like diary entries or this is a million-dollar question.
SPEAKER_01:And um it makes environment it makes this type of environmental history challenging because there is no finding aid in an archive that has like sensorial like records marked out, right? But I go and look in um, I look a lot about housing and ventilation and questions of ventilation because ventilation is often about heat and um a lack of through and through air currents. So I look in housing reports and concerns about housing. I also do a lot of um visual media because we can capture everyday people and the way they're trying to cool their bodies off. And so the syndicated uh news photographs of the early 20th century have tons of images of people trying to cool their bodies. I look at paintings as well, which um capture everyday life. And then I do I look at diary entries, reports about factories and working conditions, that type of material as well, oral histories, and that's a lot of combing through material just to get to somebody saying it was so hot that weren't fans for people like us. We had to sleep on the roof. But then you find that and you're like, ah wow.
SPEAKER_00:No, I yeah, I sympathize with that. Um then I guess what what specifically drew you to kind of um looking at this like historically versus like, you know, finding like looking at current day pictures or ask just asking people like, oh, how do you deal with the heat?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think it's because I'm an urban and environmental historian, but uh I was thinking about how do I how does environment manifest in cities? And my I had been trained in kind of thinking about city planning and parks as capital end nature in cities, or pollution and the way that it degrades water quality in New York Bay, or it threatens drinking water. So, like these kind of tactical types of in environmental history. But I became, as I started to read more about heat, I became interested in the ephemeral, intangible, but still tactile types of environment that is weather.
SPEAKER_00:What like drew you then to kind of studying heat like through the urban on the urban scale, then? Like because it seems like a lot of your work is centered around cities like New York in particular.
SPEAKER_01:So there, you know, the field of environmental history comes traditionally out. Actually, the earliest work that we consider to be kind of the vanguard work in environmental history comes out of a tradition of Western history and history of capital and nature, national parks, uh forestry, fisheries, uh, these kind of things, uh the types of topics that it won't surprise you that it's a question of environment, right? The creation of the National Park Service is about preserving nature in American landscapes. But by the time I was in graduate school in the uh early 2000s, there was a robust first generation, for two, almost two generations of urban environmental historians who had started to think that, you know, as uh Bill Cronin famously wrote, the problem with wilderness, if we only think about wilderness as nature or environment, we're missing the day-to-day. We're missing how nature and environment manifest in every single landscape that humans live in, suburbs, national parks, the New York City subway, right? None of them are, none of them are empty of nature, just that environment looks different in these different landscapes. And for me, when I'm interested in the sensory history of climate, but you can't tell a sensory history that isn't located in a space, right? Bodies exist in space. Like we feel hot in our apartments, our apartments exist on a city block in New York. Our city block sits in the city grid, which sits, you know, in the larger metropolitan area. And so it's a nice merging for me of the real spatiality that urban history offers and built environment that urban history kind of keys us into, and then bringing in this question of how how can we broadly define environment to incorporate not just an experience, you know, in Yellowstone, but also on a city street.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, that's that's really interesting. I wonder if there's like researchers out there that specifically look into like people's sensory experiences in forests. I think I think that'd be bet there are. Yeah, I think that'd be interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Those cultural geographers, Jason. I bet I bet that's what there's somebody there doing awesome work.
SPEAKER_00:Like they're going way, way back. Like they're looking at like carvings to see how people experience heat back then. Um, but yeah, I guess with that being said, um, kind of moving on to the next section. Um, so before coming onto this podcast, um, you also came on to uh came by to the heat lab meeting, and we talked about one of your essays um titled Hot Town: Sensing Heat in Summertime Manhattan. Um, and you know, we talked talked a little bit about what kind of like archives you're looking at to get to, you know, these sensory experiences. Um, and in this essay, you use uh political cartoon, news photography, and the work of two artists to kind of understand the collective experiences of summer heat in a pre-HVAC city. Um, and so I guess can you discuss any notable findings or insights that you got from writing this essay?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So I think looking for heat in research, particularly in the historic record for New York City, which is where my research focuses, is like blinking. When you don't think about blinking, but your body blinks constantly, right? And then when I say it to you, you're all of a sudden going to start to feel your eyelids moving. It's the same as when you start to look for heat. You think, oh, it's not gonna be too much in the archive. I'm gonna have to dig. It's not in a finding aid. But when you start to dig, it's everywhere. Because past and present, when you run into somebody or you're reading the newspaper, what kind of topics are like the number one topic of conversation? We all talk about the weather. We talk about how it feels. When we get on our Zooms, we talk about, you know, how you feel, what your weather is like. This is a constant mode of a constant topic of conversation. And I don't think it's mundane. It's often a thing that we say, oh, you talk about the weather when there's nothing else to say. But it actually can help us understand the everyday experiences of our climate. And for me, I was looking to understand early representations of the urban heat island effect, this phenomenon in which the geometry and materials we use to in our cities, so the geometry of the city, the way we build our cities in the materials we use, stone, brick, paving uh absorbs heat and holds onto it. And so I was looking for this phenomenon in the past. To what extent was there recognition that cities had this, what you know, anthropogenic microclimatic effect? And in my research, I came to realize that New Yorkers absolutely knew that some parts of the city were hotter than others. And they talked about it all the time. And so I went looking for evidence of that and I looked to visual culture to try to get to the voices of folks who maybe weren't leaving records that were written, but whose experiences I wanted to understand. And so I went looking for folks in a pre-HVAC New York, a pre-climate control technology, with the expectation that these people probably were very much attuned and exposed to temperature differentials and really extreme heat during the summer. And photographs are an interesting way to think about heat as a uh a way to find heat in the archives because if we're going to think about weather and climate as a type of environment, some types of weather are easier to see in uh the archives, right? Rain and snow are physical manifestations that we can see photos of. But heat is a is tricky. It isn't something that is visible. We have to see how it impacts people's bodies, and we then get to read people's bodies for heat. And so that's what I thought was a useful challenge, like intellectual challenge for me is to how to read in the visual record, how people understood their city to be absorbing heat and how they responded to try to mitigate that extreme heat uh during the summer.
SPEAKER_00:So, how did you find that people like adapt to the heat? Like uh you mentioned before about like people going to beaches and parks that were like outside of the city. Like, did you notice, I guess, photographs of that? I also think the idea is interesting. Like, the more I think about it, just kind of it's hot, so we'll go somewhere where it's not hot, like climate flight, you know?
SPEAKER_01:Right. Well, the New York Times, Jason, calls the folks who leave the city who can afford to leave the city climate refugees in the 19th century. They're like, it's hot here, and if you can afford to get out, you're out. But then they point out that people and they they refer to the people who can't leave, the working class and poor, as Prometheus chained to their like steaming rock. And that it's really um, it's I know you love 19th century, you love a 19th century newspaper who's trying, who's got like all the vocab for torrid and sweltering and sizzling, gorgeous. It's a really fun, um, kind of uh colorful language that they use. And you find out it actually becomes uh much easier to find heat outdoors because so many people have to go into public. They have to take their private lives public because the interior environment, the thermal environment of their apartments just gets so hot. In the 1896 heat wave that New York suffers through, it's their first more than week-long heat wave. It's the first 10-day heat wave in the city. And Jacob Reese, who's a muck raking photographer, he's a famous reformer at the turn of the century, he writes in How the Other Half Lives that temperatures inside tenements that were poorly ventilated were reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit. So people don't outside. It's too hot to sleep in there. People have a coal burning, uh cast iron stove to cook their food. That's going to add more heat. These apartments are super crowded. There's a ton of people living in very small apartments. And so people go outside and they're sleeping in parks, they're sleeping on roofs, they're sleeping on fire escapes, and the uh the newspaper and illustrated magazines and syndicated photographers, and then artists go out, and people are just outside. And there's a hierarchy to where you want to be. And we they write about this in the papers. The goal would be to be able to sleep outside on the water, like on the dock or on a recreation pier or on a dock, because the water is going to be a cool island to the city's hot island, right? To the city's heat island, that the water doesn't water is a material that absorbs heat much more slowly than say concrete, and it holds it at much lower um levels. So to go to the water is a cooler breeze. So people, that's your number one place. If you can get a place to sleep on a bench by the waterfront, the next best thing is gonna be on a roof because there's going to be breeze. Let's let's put a tie. It's either a roof or in a park. You can get a place because green landscapes, vegetated landscapes don't hold on to heat uh the way like a built environment does. So that's gonna be appealing. A rooftop is appealing because you're gonna get the breeze across the city. You can kind of be in contact with the breeze. The next best is gonna be the fire escape, which is outside, but might not have any breeze. And then the folks who can't get anywhere else are gonna sleep on their stoops or in a wagon parked on the city street. Or I guess I would we can get back to our folks who are sleeping on the steps to the subway. So the more you can expose your body to uh breezes and cooler temperatures, like the cool island of the waterfront or park, the better off you would be.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, this that entire hierarchy is really fascinating. I wonder if you were to like map out like where people wanted to go and where they stayed. I guess that's kind of like a very early temperature mapping of the urban heat island effect. I'm sure they're they're probably congregated in, you know, like you already said they're congregated in places that aren't like super concrete heavy. So like your water here, like in parks.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's really and of course then it gives us this social distribution of heat and the way people respond in pre-HVAC is going to be laden with the social and demographic discriminations, right? If you live in a neighborhood that doesn't have a park, it is harder for you to find a green place to cool off. Or if you're a minority in the city in the early 20th century and there isn't, there aren't Jim Crow laws in the state of New York, but there are racial, like um kind of racial boundaries that are being policed and racial discrimination, which is gonna keep uh, you know, the Puerto Rican, black, and Chinese New Yorkers from accessing some of them, maybe like certain cooler spaces. So the way the city is policing racial racial boundaries is gonna create inequality.
SPEAKER_00:Uh yeah, I mean, uh my my thesis, um, part of it was facing the the history of environmental justice. Um and you know, environmental justice, like a big discussion, of course, is distribution of parks, but I don't think anyone really talks about distribution of heat in that aspect as well.
SPEAKER_01:I think it's wise. I think it's a wise thing to consider.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, I totally agree. Um, I wonder if like the kind of post-HVAC modern day version of that is Elon Musk saying that we should flee the Earth and go to Mars for cooler.
SPEAKER_01:Well, uh it's the the privilege to say uh the privilege to say, well, we've made a mess of it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, let's just get out of here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's not that's not a privilege everybody has.
SPEAKER_00:Uh I guess also in this paper, you kind of talk about this concept called heatscapes. Uh, can you tell us a little bit more about that?
SPEAKER_01:So this is inspired by uh cultural geographers. Um uh there's this kind of sensorial turn in cultural geography that looks at all different types of scapes. So the landscape is the kind of the characteristics of the space you are in and how you view it as your landscape. But cultural geography says, well, what about smellscapes? And what about soundscapes and all these sensor sensorial ways that we actually interact with our built environment? Because the landscape distance, right? Your the viewer is distant from the thing they're looking across to. But our sensorial experiences, they surround us and they permeate all our spaces. So uh smellscape uh or a soundscape or a heatscape are ways that we can remind ourselves that we're always situated in the landscape that we're looking at. And so I like this idea. It's been something I've been playing with as a way to put people and the experience of people and bodies into the concept of the urban heat island effect. That it isn't just something that is statistical that we measure, but it's something that we feel.
SPEAKER_00:Oh yeah, no, that's a cool concept and uh definitely like connects to a lot of the things we were talking about before. Um, and so I guess another interesting thing that I think has kind of come up from this conversation so far is that I feel like a lot of us we tend to think of heat as a newly bad issue because of all the like rhetoric that's going around about climate change, global warming. Um, but then, you know, as we've learned, like historically, it's been maybe an even bigger issue before we had HVAC. I guess do you have anything to like say about that? Or could you tell us like other things that perhaps we've other aspects of heat that we've kind of misconceptualized?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so the urban heat island effect, this is not a new phenomenon that we understand it. The rise of urban climatology in the 1960s and uh forward really professionalizes and can quantify in great like mathematical detail what is happening with the urban heat island effect. And so there is a lot of uh really important science that comes after the Second World War in Germany, in the United States. But the understanding that cities absorb heat and hold on to it, that is not that is not a 20th century phenomenon. The the urban climatologists identify Luke Howard, who is an amateur meteorologist taking temperature readings in downtown London and kind of the hinterland of London in the early 1800s. And he publishes The Climate of London in 1818 and then through the 1820s, there's multiple volumes. And he doesn't have the mathematics to explain exactly what's happening, but he identifies the main components of the urban heat island effect in the early 19th century. And even when I come across the pond and look at my research in the United States, people know that it's hot. For example, Noah Webster of Webster's Dictionary in 1792, he's living in Philadelphia and he writes about New York City, and he's like, Well, when you go to New York City, the twisty, narrow streets and the lack of trees make those streets too hot in the summer. In 1792. So there's a deep historical understanding that the way humans are building cities is changing the microclimate of cities and it's making them hotter. And we can see that across the late uh late 1700s through the 1800s, um, kind of continuing on. What is striking about that to me is that we have known this for so long. And so then my research that I'm doing now is in what ways did government respond or not respond, or did community ask for changes that the government could or could not give, or was not willing to pay for, or did not have control over real estate to enforce. Because I have found these New Yorkers talking all through the 19th century about how hot it is. And sometimes they're mad. Like they write to the newspaper and they say, Hey, you're taking temperature from Central Park, and that's bogus because it is not as cool in Central Park where I live. And you should become taking the temperature where I live, because that's the real temperature. And so I'm curious to see this push and pull between official um kind of scientific understandings of the urban heat island effect and then the way that New Yorkers live with it on a daily level.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, have you found anything notable in terms of like uh 1800s government responses to heat?
SPEAKER_01:I see there's lots of interest in it. The public health department is crucially interested in heat in the summer, particularly because there's such high infant mortality rates in the summer. And uh they're they're trying to figure out how climate and infant mortality are intersecting. They can correlate it, but they can't figure out causation. Or they think they know causation, but they haven't yet. It's the adoption of germ theory that helps them really understand because infant death in the summer is coming from what they call cholera and phantom or the summer complaint. But what is its diarrheal uh diseases and illnesses that then lead to dehydration? So it's a hygienic issue because of unclean hands, unclean water. Uh, there's bacteriological infections in the summer because the heat encourages the growth of bacteria. They don't know that in 1866, but they really want to figure out why so many infants are dying and in particular neighborhoods with overcrowding. So that's a good example where they're really interested. And so they want to they decide to clean the streets, and that doesn't, it's not actually the causation, but it helps improve. Like sanitation does in fact reduce diarrheal diseases if you're going to kind of clean up the city. There's housing reformers who are really interested in ventilation and cross currents of air to get through buildings so they know tenements are really hot. There's a whole push to plant trees and to particularly plant trees in crowded neighborhoods that have no parks. So there are lots of different ways that reformers push for change. Whether or not those changes get implemented is a story that has a kind of more mixed results. But the interest is there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, that's interesting. I mean, I think the things you mentioned, like planting trees, um ventilation, I think those are things that people are trying to implement today in regards to climate change. It's really just like, you know, history repeats itself. Um Right.
SPEAKER_01:I was just I was just reading this afternoon um from the Christian Register, which is a reformer newspaper published out of Boston about a heat wave in 1905 in New York, and they say every building should be mandated to put a garden on the roof. I was like, hey guys, we're talking about that in 2024.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um, I also think it's really interesting that you use the word kind of reformer. Um, and I think like right now we have kind of this focus on on resilience, heat resilience, this idea that you know the earth's hot, it's like done for, we got and we got to figure out ways to endure it. And I feel like there's less talk on kind of I at least in the specific context of heat, like heat sustainability, like trying to stop our ways of of living in which we cause heat in the first place. Like I think it's a lot easier to get a park built than to stop like a factory from polluting this much heat.
SPEAKER_01:Right. That this greenhouse gases, which are leading to uh leading to higher global temperatures. So when I talk about reformers, I'm happy you asked Jason because the late 19th and early 20th century is kind of the peak of the push for governmental, social, political reform in New York City. Uh, the city has an incredible differential between the very rich and the very poor. And so I mentioned Jacob Rist, he writes how the other half lives. That's about what it's like to be someone who's, you know, really living on the margins and living in an overcrowded apartment in a dangerous job, working in a dangerous job with no labor protections, in a how apartment that has no housing regulations. And there's a big push for governmental reform across all levels of New York City. And then that becomes the progressive era of the turn of the 20th century US. And I I've just uh kind of forced you into your US survey again. But it's a it's a moment of in which the the city government listens to folks who say we can do better. We owe New Yorkers as a collective something better. It a lot does. There is an enormous amount of reform that comes out of this, but it it doesn't hit, of course, not all of the asks are met.
SPEAKER_00:That's really interesting. I mean, cyclic things happening history.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yes, yes.
SPEAKER_00:And I guess with that, we can move on to kind of the next uh little notch of our conversation. Um, so currently you act as co-investigator for this project called Melting Metropolis Everyday Histories of Health and Heat in London, New York, and Paris since 1945. Uh, before this podcast, I looked on y'all's website and it seems like y'all do a lot. And to be honest, I'm not fully sure of what y'all do. So I guess we can start off by me asking um, can you tell us a little bit more about this project and what your role is in it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we're it's a really big team. You're right. And so it's a project that brings together uh environmental historians, oral historians, and geographers to look at the question of rising global temperatures through cities, extreme heat events, and the urban heat island, and this question that uh heat is sometimes best uh brought into focus when it becomes a challenge to public health. Heat is the number one natural disaster that takes lives in America, that takes lives in New York City. Same thing for, you know, we can translate this across the other three case studies. And so we look at three cities that are in temperate climates, so London, Paris, and New York, and don't have a tradition of uh climatologically sensitive design. So there are cities that are not designed with heat in mind, but then are seeing increasing heat uh number, number and extremes of heat events. And so public health is a way for us to bring together uh cultural geography, oral histories, and history to think about ways in which urbanites have experienced heat and sought to mitigate its impact on their health and well-being. And we're trying to look at kind of four different aspects of heat. One is to understand the experience of urban heat and like through affected communities. So it's a real social history, a social science approach to heat, again, not a meteorological uh or data-driven approach. And we're also inspired by um climate justice to think about how public health, municipal policies, and community practices have brought the question of health and environmental health to this conversation about heat and exposure to extreme heat. We're also interested in how looking at the past can help us think about urban interventions beyond this idea of resilience, which is a term you've already brought up. Resilience is very much a popular term when we think about climate change in the um United States, but also in a global context that we have to, you know, bounce back, build back better. Um, you know, post-sandy, post uh heat wave, post-flood. But the question of resilience really, it's hard on when we talk about public health and the body's experience of heat because extreme our bodies are only ever going to be so resilient to heat. There's a physiological stopping point where you can't no matter how much you tell a community to be resilient or talk about this as a tactic, our bodies can only take so much exposure to extreme temperatures. And so, what does it mean if we move away from this question of resiliency to ask about questions of maybe eco grief or climate climactic uncertainty in the face of climate breakdown? Like, what does that mean for an individual? It's scary. What does it mean for a community? But also, how in asking these really tough, you know, like the worst person to invite to a dinner party, when you come in with your climate, uh, you like your climate research and you tell everyone it's just hot and getting hotter and it's not good. But we also are looking to balance that to see how folks in Paris, London, and New York have also always embraced heat, that there's also there's always this sense that you know, summer is going to be threatening, high temperatures are going to be threatening on all these different levels. But there is like a thermal delight in summer, and there's, you know, there's when we tell climate history, we also need to see not just the apocalyptic declensionist world is on literal fire in the case of studying heat, like you and I, but to see that there are moments of artistic inspiration and joy and how communities respond. So we have that aim. So it's about community well, well-being as well as physical well-being in the face of heat.
SPEAKER_00:No, that's really interesting. I really liked, I really like the aspect of kind of flipping the narrative of, oh, like we're doomed, um, climactic despair, even though it's probably most likely true. Um, and as a as an Angelino, uh, even though Los Angeles is not London, New York, or Paris, um, I definitely feel some of the, you know, like sunny LA, like here in Los Angeles, we we love our heat. We have palm trees everywhere that don't provide shade but make it more sunny. And sometimes it's annoying, but sometimes it's also like it's like a romantic image. Like it's it's good to take the light in it. And you know, if we're we're stuck in the heat, might as well like make the most of it. Um so I guess can you talk a little bit more about some of like the work that you've specifically done with this project?
SPEAKER_01:So I'm leading on the New York City case study, which won't surprise you uh as a historian of New York City, and we focus on Queens. I teach in Queens at um in Flushing. We work with Queens Memory Project in the Queen, which is part of the Queen's Public Library in Jamaica. Queens is the largest borough, it's 103 square miles, but it's often seen as peripheral. It is geographically peripheral, but also outside of, say, like the you know, the power system of City Hall in downtown Manhattan. But because we're interested in thinking about community experiences, we're focused, we've kind of moved to, we've moved our research focus to Queens. And it starts in this project starts in post-45. And we are looking at questions of access to public swimming pools. And when public swimming pools are um are built is mostly before 45, but there's a little spurt in the Lindsay administration in New York City in 68 through early 70s. So, like the push for access to cooling infrastructure. We're interested in the beaches of Queens, it has big ocean front beaches and Rockaway, and how folks have engaged with the beaches as a way to cool down. We're interested in um uh NYCHA, which is the New York City Housing Authority or public housing in the city, and experiences of tenants who push for access to air conditioning as the uh 20th century rolls along. And we came to these topics because we had we had ideas of what we wanted to write about, but we didn't want to come in from the top down. And so last summer we were in a pilot study in two different corners of Queens where we offered um crafting activities and historic photographs and uh polled residents of Queens about what topics they thought. And so out of that comes as well the focus on uh cooling infrastructure, access to beaches and pools, and particularly the link between air pollution, because last summer we had wildfire smoke, and that was on everybody's minds at these kind of the changing climate crisis, these overlapping challenges. And so we're just in year two, I should say. So we have a lot of our path mapped out for us about where we're going next.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um, and you know, you you spoke about like not wanting to take like a top-down approach. And yeah, I mean, I noticed as well on y'all's website, y'all have like so many events going on, like community events. Um, I saw like workshops. Um, I saw that you like curated this like the art exhibit called handling the heat. Um and I guess like, can you tell me a little bit more about why y'all are taking this more like kind of bottom-up approach to kind of understanding heat?
SPEAKER_01:And I have to say that this is something that my uh melting metropolis uh collaborators are really teaching me because again, I'm trained as a city planning environmental historian, marsh grass and bridges, social history is something I am learning in real time. And um Melting Metropolis as a project really centers community engagement and public engagement, which we see as two different things. Community engagement is that ground up uh listening to communities to say how has your history been told? What hasn't been told? What do you want to have told about your history on any topic, right? And for us, it's about climate and heat. It's about working with communities and partners, uh, and also giving a voice to amplify marginal communities that feel marginalized, that live in neighborhoods that are, say, marginalized from the Parks Department budget or the tree planting budget, uh, to make sure there's inclusive vision of who gets to tell the story of New York City history is a long-standing goal of one of our project partners, which is Queen's Memory Project, which is a community-sourced archive. Does a lot of oral history and public collecting days to say, like, bring in your family photographs, come and tell us about your experiences. And so community engagement really helps us center that type of history. And so we're both writing history, but we're also help building an archive that captures the community's voices. And then public engagement is a way of bringing our research to an audience outside of academia. And we get to do that because we work with, we have a research artist on the team, Brianie Ella. And she and I are collaborating this spring. We're leading six walk-in tours, but they're really called walk shops because it's half environmental history walking tour about how we've built the urban heat island and the way it uh it threatens health and the way it is unevenly distributed across the city. But then Briney brings in her experience as a kind of multidisciplinary artist and her very sensorial and embodied art. And so she is leading us on um mark making exercises that help us translate the way we feel in the city as we move through it into art to put in conversation artistic representation of climate and heat with a historical context.
SPEAKER_00:I was curious, like from this kind of bottom-up community-engaged approach, like have y'all learned anything particularly surprising or interesting from these community members?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'll have to answer at the end of June. So what we're doing, we have our walkshops um that are coming in June. And so we're building these and we're going to continue to do them over time. And I could just like maybe I speak that. So our goal of the walkshops this coming spring, and we're working with as a climate action partner for coal and ice, which is a multi uh climate exhibit exhibit that looks at these two extremes of the coal that is being uh burned, mined, and creating the climate crisis. And then the melting of the ice is the kind of the mirror opposite of that, right? And it's this really fabulous exhibit that has all these different climate partners in the city that are helping to bring the conversation about climate change from the museum exhibit, which is gorgeous and it's at the Asia Society on the Upper East Side, but bring it into public conversations. And so we're as a climate action partner taking folks for these free walks. We're doing six of them, two in Brooklyn, two in Queens, two in Manhattan, uh, to think about how, when, and why heat islands arise, and then hopefully engage folks in conversations about what it means to think about climate change and the urban heat islands through our through our bodies and through our experiences in the city. So we're gonna walk around in three different boroughs to and then start the conversation.
SPEAKER_00:I see. Um, I guess that means we'll have to do a part two in uh in July.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um our other our other thing that we're looking that we're gonna kick off this year, because it's year two, is uh through Queen's Memory Project, which solicits uh community memories, is we're gonna start soliciting oral histories and then family photographs. Because are you ready for this? Last year when we made the photography exhibit out of Queen's Memories photography collection, which is a fabulous collection of New York City um history through photographs, we couldn't find a single photograph of a hydrant that had been opened within the Queen's collections. Now there are other, there are these photographs, but the library doesn't have one. So, like in doing this work, we've we're identifying the ways we can build out community experiences. Because if you've lived in long New York long enough, you have gone by and opened hydrant, or you have opened a hydrant, or you've been at um you've been at a party where the um fire department gives out hydrant caps so that we can the communities can open them without you know wasting water. So that's like for an example, that in doing this work in the research, we can then start to solicit folks in the community to share their stories to build out our understanding and the record of how we handle the heat in Queens, but in all the boroughs.
SPEAKER_00:So that's that's interesting. I mean, so in New York, is like is that like a common way of like cooling down people just open up fire hydrants and then let water erupt?
SPEAKER_01:There's a huge history of this. And when I in my own research, like pre-1945, all the time, and it makes people wedge open a fire hydrant, uh, but then it's really they're really hard to close. There's a ton of water pressure that comes shooting out. And so in the 20th century, this the city creates these caps that you can get um from the fire department to safely and sustainably open up a hydrant. But it's a classic when you think about the imagery of 20th century New York in the summer, it's a classic um motif as the open hydrant.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, that's really cool. I mean, that's I don't think that's a thing in Los Angeles as much. No, like it becomes very much a thing.
SPEAKER_01:It's very much a thing in New York City. It's a classic uh visual.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. Um, and then I get you already talked a little bit about this, um, but I guess what's like the long-term like vision or goal? Like you talked already about like public engagement and having these like art galleries. And so I guess like is y'all's goal to kind of just like raise awareness of these like narratives, or is it like for policy change or like some combination? Like, is a report gonna come out of this? Like, what's what's the vision?
SPEAKER_01:It's a yes and situation, Jason. Here it we are both doing the kind of our academic research, but our goal is to contribute to Queen's memories, uh, projects, wonderful collections to help build out this story of climate history in Queens, in their archives, soliciting oral histories. There's long-term uh public engagement and artistic projects that are going to come out of this. I'm gonna commission um artwork from local community artists to help translate the type of work we're doing into um something that is publicly accessible and beautiful and thoughtful. And um that's you'll be very relieved to hear that that is not me. That's my uh that is not my responsibility. Uh, it is the uh under the purview of our fabulous research artist on the team, Brianie Ella. And then we have uh researchers who are looking on similar topics in Paris and similar topics in London, and we have community partners across these two cities. Uh our fearless leader, Chris Pearson, is leading on London and Paris, and then we have geographers who are doing uh public health and are doing ethnographies and being embedded in community organizations that think about environmental justice and climate in London. So we have lots of moving pieces, and the group as a whole, our goal is to build out this historical understanding of how heat has been changing in cities with the great acceleration post-45, and to think about climate, heat exposure to heat, access to cooling infrastructure, whether that's an air conditioning or a pool or a shady street, as these transnational questions of environmental justice as we face increasingly hot summers in these temperate cities and we face climate change. And so, of course, the goal then is for policy as well, and to reach voters to help understand how urban heat is part of climate change. And that like that that slow violence of rising temperatures are something that we need to, you know, when we need to bring to our city officials, our state leaders, our federal politicians when we ask for equity, thermal equity has to be part of it as well.
SPEAKER_00:Unfortunately, we're just about running out of time. And so I guess to wrap up, um, we also wanted to note that you are an educator. Um, on your website, you have like all these different classes you taught. And so I guess for our last kind of discussion, um, I guess what do you think is like most important to keep in mind for uh like what wisdom would you impart to future generations of people working on heat?
SPEAKER_01:Well, when I teach New York City history or I teach the urban environment in New York, um there's always this question of like what kind when we think about environment and who controls our environment. Most of new most of New York is our renters. A lot of my students are young. And so how much can we control what the city is doing and what our environment looks like? But that there's a long tradition of environmental activism, that of communities demanding cleaner streets, uh safer homes, lead-free paint, the demands to have minimum interior temperatures in the winter. Like it's state law in New York about how cold an apartment can get. That's a tenant protection that is environmental. And so I want them to think about climate as part of this story, that our environment includes the climate, and that we should look at this tradition of environmental justice, environmental activism, and the fact that the city has a tradition of supplying environmental amenities and that we can and should demand of our city that thermal comfort and environmental, you know, and access to green, cool spaces should be part of the environment that we as New Yorkers deserve and should ask for. I also think that teaching about summer and heat reminds me that not all history, we can't just teach the hard, sad bits. I mean, that's often a lot of it in a history class, but there's great joy in summer as well. So when I ask my students the first thing about summer, the film they never say it's too hot and the climate is on fire. They say, I love when the ice cream truck, we call it Mr. It's Mr. Softy in New York. I love when I hear Mr. Softie for the first time in the summer. Or, you know, I go to the beach uh at Rockaway, and you know, we see these like kind of community memories and the fun involved in so in Venet. So summer is also fun in the city, and that's a good reminder that people are outdoors and they're enjoying like living life outside and what the city has to offer. So can't just we also need to do Mr. Softy and baseball games. It can't just be declensionist terror.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, I I actually I I absolutely love that. I mean, I think in you know, in like climate, not just climate research, but I think it in life in general, we tend to, you know, we tend to just focus on like negative things, and it's like it can be kind of like, oh man, things are dooming glooming. So I I do, I I like I really like the idea of also, you know, finding joy and the things that are there to appreciate about this.
SPEAKER_01:Um maybe we really need to write, Jason, an oral history of of uh ice cream trucks.
SPEAKER_00:That's true.
SPEAKER_01:Maybe that's the answer. And I know you have done the heat lab has done great work about how hot it can be inside the truck.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But what about what about the people who wait in line and what maybe we just need to do some taste testing?
SPEAKER_00:What about like, yeah, the the coolness that is distributed?
SPEAKER_01:That what is the best, what is the best sprinkle flavor, right? Somebody's gotta do that.
SPEAKER_00:It's beautiful. The how much the SpongeBob popsicle mitigates the the urban heat island effect.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yes. Sign me up for that research.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, me too. Well, yeah, thanks for thanks so much for coming by. This was uh an excellent conversation.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I hope that you and Chelsea figure out a way that I get to see you guys next month. Now I expect to see you every month.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, we'll meet for we'll meet at an ice cream truck.
SPEAKER_01:Excellent. That's where we'll start the research. All right. Well, thanks so much for this invitation. Thanks for this great conversation. The really thoughtful questions. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, thanks so much for coming by. I think this was a really good conversation. You can also learn more about the UCLA Heat Lab on our website, heatlab.humspace H U M S P A C E dot UCLA dot edu. Once more, we would like to give a special thank you to the Green Initiative Fund for making this production possible. And if you enjoyed our podcast, please feel free to leave us a rating. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on the Hot Takes Podcast.
