Thomas Hyo-min King is an environmental designer and urbanist from rural Nova Scotia, Canada. His work focuses on strategies for delivering building rehabilitations and energy infrastructure that improve extant living conditions while reinforcing energetic and economic democracy among disinvested building populations.
Charlston Britton is an architect, and RISD Presidential Fellow from New Orleans whose work is deeply shaped by the legacy of Hurricane Katrina. Pursuing a Master of Design in Adaptive Reuse with a concentration in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies, his work and research explore the intersection of craft and resilience through spatial interventions.
What happens to floodplain buyout sites after demolition of structures? Does ecological restoration or reconciliation of the floodplain occur? By what criteria should we assess what is on the site? Under what conditions do government programs promote more ecologically dynamic land management?
In California, the buildings people live in are among the state’s largest sources of climate pollution. Retrofitting them is a core part of the state’s climate plan — but until recently, there were few safeguards in place to protect the people inside. Chelsea Kirk, a policy strategist and housing advocate based in Los Angeles, is helping to change that.
A Renters’ Right to Cooling draws on the experiences of tenants in South L.A., an area disproportionately burdened by the effects of climate change and extreme heat, with less tree shade, green space, and other infrastructure investments than other parts of the city.
Maria Lopez Vazquez is a multicultural landscape designer from the border region of Tijuana-San Diego (MX-US). She has a Bachelors of Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley. By pursuing her Master's in Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, she hopes to inform her landscape design practice with sustainable efforts as an artist and maker.
The Just Cities Institute advances racial justice in public policy and urban planning through transformative models of participatory and community-based design.
Following the Los Angeles fires, Chelsea Kirk launched The Rent Brigade: “a collective of tenant organizers, advocates, web programmers, designers, researchers, and other Angelenos using data to fight back against predatory landlords”...
By offering new “possibilities of policy evaluation” that emerge from climate justice imaginaries in Boston, this paper showcases how visions of the just and unjust city can serve as governing devices to transform policy evaluation practices and advance more just climate futures.
Urban soils are often overlooked in climate resilience planning and policy. In their October 2024 Nature comment article, Shankar and co-authors advocate for a broader framing of urban soils within an equity-centred social ecological...
