In the summer of 1995, a blistering heat wave settled over Chicago for three days. It killed 739 people, making it one of the most unexpectedly lethal disasters in modern American history. No statistical models of the heat wave predicted such a high death toll. Researchers in the American Journal of Public Healthreported that their analysis “failed to detect relationships between the weather and mortality that would explain what happened.”
Just as mysterious as the number of fatalities was the way they were distributed across the city. Several of the most deadly areas were entirely black and disproportionately poor, but so were three of the least deadly. Adjacent areas that looked alike—like Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two hyper-segregated black South Side neighborhoods with high poverty and crime—suffered vastly different effects......
Throughout the city, the variable that best explained the pattern of mortality during the Chicago heat wave was what people in my discipline call social infrastructure. Places with active commercial corridors, a variety of public spaces, local institutions, decent sidewalks, and community organizations fared well in the disaster. More socially barren places did not. Turns out neighborhood conditions that isolate people from each other on a good day can, on a really bad day, become lethal.
To continue reading this article by Eric Klinenberg, go to: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/...vive-climate-change/
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