Mapping Urban Heat

Gathering Data Helps Reshape the Future of a City

By Betsy Loring

About Betsy: I am a museum exhibit planner (yup – it’s a real job) and a Planning-Curious Museum Person (not a real job - yet).  In my blog, naturally titled the Planning Curious Museum Person, I explore the ways that museum professional can intersect with urban and regional planning work. This is what led me to get excited about Taylor’s work as an urban planner and a data viz whiz. 

First, a bit of background:

Most of my museum work is in science and children’s museums, which means that I focus on finding ways to increase STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) literacy in people of all ages. STEM literacy is especially important in helping people deal with socio-scientific issues in their community. Socio-scientific issues, things like climate change and falling biodiversity, are complex issues that require solutions that are informed by science, but guided by societal values. This means that a wide variety of people, from students to seniors, from every profession, socioeconomic level, cultural background, disability, and gender needs the opportunity to weigh in on big decisions. And that often means helping people get comfortable with data - understanding it, interpreting it, perhaps gathering it, and, most importantly, applying it to their lives. 

One of my favorite projects to get people deeply involved in socio-scientific topics that affect peoples lives was an exhibition called City Science: The Science You Live, which we developed in collaboration with urban planning professors.  City Science explores the STEM behind the planning, design, and redesign of cities. Several of the exhibit interactives invite people to design a neighborhood, then presents them with information (aka data) about an impact of their design (e.g. cutting damaging a habitat or creating a heat island). Seeing the impact of the neighborhood they built, people readily reconfigured their design.

In this interactive called “City Hot Zones”, an infrared camera showed people how the model city they design would heat up on a hot sunny day. Once people could see that green spaces and trees kept some areas cool, they would redesign their city, adding parks, trees, and green roofs.

It’s this power of offering people data - on personally-meaningful issues, in easy-to understand formats - that lead me to write the Planning-Curious Museum Person. In the blog, I highlight the ways that museums can increase people’s engagement in civic issues - usually by engaging them with data in some fashion. Here’s an example of one museum project where collecting locally-relevant data – and the visualization of that data – has led to impacts far beyond anyone’s expectation.

In July 2017, the then climate scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia (SMV), Jeremy Hoffman, worked with the environmental justice organization Groundwork RVA to record the temperature in various neighborhoods. The Groundwork youth biked and drove through their neighborhoods, measuring the temperature in the morning, afternoon, and evening of a summer day. The project documented a 16-degree (F) difference in afternoon temperature between Richmond’s coolest and hottest neighborhoods and shared the results in this heat vulnerability map(below). The project was designed originally to increase climate literacy in the youth participating in the project, with the hope that they would feel empowered to implement climate solutions as they embarked on their careers. But the project quickly produced other, much border lessons.

The first important lesson from this data-gathering is that the data was “civically-legitimate”, as well as locally-relevant. Rather than university scientists or city officials swooping to the neighborhood to do research, the temperature data collectors were local residents. And the data helped put hard numbers to people’s lived experience each summer. It’s one thing to stand up at a City Council meeting and say that it is unbearably hot in your neighborhood. It’s another to be able to point to a map of hard data to back up your words.

The data map quickly yielded other lessons. When Hoffman from the Museum presented the data map in a public forum, someone familiar with the public ambulance service data noted that the hottest neighborhoods had the highest incidence of heat-illness calls each summer.  Moreover, the local history museum remarked on the resemblance between the heat vulnerability map and the Richmond’s red-lining map, which was used to segregate the city by race.

Redlining map source Virginia Encyclopedia (Curious about the History of Redlining and want to know more? Check out this data story with more information about it)

Soon, the city of Richmond’s planning department incorporated the SMV data and map into its first climate action plan, RVAgreen 2050 and the city’s master plan. The heat vulnerability map and the City plan have been a driving force behind the Reforest Richmond project which is “committed, not only to increasing citywide tree canopy, but also to dismantling systemic racism and environmental injustice through an evolving, equity-centered, community-driven effort.”

The data have also helped residents in one of the hottest neighborhoods to protect existing city green space (ironically, from the City of Richmond itself). Residents and environmental justice organizations cited Richmond’s master plan and the heat island data to successfully fight the city Fire Department’s plan to build a fire training facility in the midst of one of the few green spaces in the predominantly Black Southside neighborhood.

The lessons have since rippled out across the U.S. Since this Richmond data-collecting project, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which funded the SMV study, has funded dozens of other community-led heat-mapping projects. The correlation between redlining and residential urban heat islands is consistent across the U.S. To dig into more of this heat data, check out the National Integrated Heat Health Information System’s Heat.gov. In short, if you live in or near a US city, this same data may already exist. 

So - why do I love this story? Data is powerful - but it is often in the hands of the already powerful: scientists, government officials, and the highly educated citizens. At the same time, some of our worst societal problems - housing shortages, climate impacts, pollution - have the highest impact on the least powerful people. And these most-impacted folks have a clear understanding of those impacts; they know that their neighborhood is hotter than the leafy suburb, they just may not have the hard numbers to prove it. When they have data - and are comfortable interpreting that data - they have a chance to engage in the civic processes that can improve their lives, neighborhood, and future.

About Betsy Loring

You can learn more about Betsy Loring and read her blog titled the Planning Curious Museum Person here.