Planners Book Club — July 2007

Heat Wave

Heat Wave was the July 2007 selection of APA's Planners Book Club.

Heat waves in the United States kill more people during a typical year than all other natural disasters combined. The weeklong heat wave in Chicago in 1995 killed more than 700 people, making it one of the deadliest in American history. But what happened in Chicago was more than a natural disaster; it was a social disaster. The city's social fabric, political system, and infrastructure contributed to the high death toll. Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave analyzes surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdown during the heat wave — including the literal and social isolation of seniors, the institutional abandonment of poor neighborhoods, and the retrenchment of public assistance programs. For planners, Heat Wave is a gripping picture of the ways the built environment interacts with social and political institutions to form the fabric of society.

Here are some questions to get your discussion of Heat Wave started:

Why did a disaster that affected so many people go virtually unrecognized?

What similarities do you see between the Chicago heat wave and Hurricane Katrina?

How can planners help communities respond to the growing number of people living alone?

What social fault lines would a disaster reveal in your community?

What effect does the degradation of public spaces have on a community in everyday life and in times of crisis?

Heat Wave focuses on a large city. How is social isolation different in suburbs and small towns?

How did planning contribute to the different "social ecologies" in Little Village and North Lawndale?

Klinenberg notes that Chicago's economic development capital was not equally distributed between the city's wards in the 1990s. Should a city spread its economic development capital around or concentrate on key areas?

What responsibility does a city have to its citizens in times of crisis?

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