Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

By Eric Klinenberg

The “compelling” story behind the 1995 Chicago weather disaster that killed hundreds—and what it revealed about our broken society (Boston Globe).

On July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index—how the temperature actually feels on the body—would hit 126. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. By July 20, over seven hundred people had perished—twenty times the number of those struck down by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Heat waves kill more Americans than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources of the city’s vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a “social autopsy,” examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been.

He investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how city government responded, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported and explained these events. Through years of fieldwork, interviews, and research, he uncovers the surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdown that contributed to this human catastrophe as hundreds died alone behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community groups, and public agencies. As this incisive and gripping account demonstrates, the widening cracks in the social foundations of American cities made visible by the 1995 heat wave remain in play in America’s cities today—and we ignore them at our peril.

Includes photos and a new preface on meeting the challenges of climate change in urban centers

“Heat Wave is not so much a book about weather, as it is about the calamitous consequences of forgetting our fellow citizens. . . . A provocative, fascinating book, one that applies to much more than weather disasters.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“It’s hard to put down Heat Wave without believing you’ve just read a tale of slow murder by public policy.” —Salon

“A classic. I can’t recommend it enough.” —Chris Hayes

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226276212

Eric Klinenberg

Eric Klinenberg is an associate professor of sociology at New York University. Author of the acclaimed Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Klinenberg has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and Slate.

Book preview

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2002, 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15                                       1 2 3 4 5 6

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27618-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27621-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226276212.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klinenberg, Eric.

Heat wave : a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago / Eric Klinenberg.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-27618-2 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-27621-2 (e-book) 1. Older disaster victims—Illinois—Chicago. 2. Disasters—Social aspects—Illinois—Chicago. 3. Older people—Services for—Illinois—Chicago. 4. Older people—Illinois—Chicago—Social conditions. 5. Heat waves (Meteorology)—Illinois—Chicago. I. Title.

HV1471.C38K585 2015

363.34992—dc23

2015002922

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

HEAT WAVE

A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

Second Edition

Eric Klinenberg

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

For my parents, Rona Talcott and Edward Klinenberg.

And for Herbert J. Davis, whose incisive mind and generous spirit will always provide inspiration.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface to the Second Edition

PROLOGUE

The Urban Inferno

INTRODUCTION

The City of Extremes

CHAPTER ONE

Dying Alone: The Social Production of Isolation

CHAPTER TWO

Race, Place, and Vulnerability: Urban Neighborhoods and the Ecology of Support

CHAPTER THREE

The State of Disaster: City Services in the Empowerment Era

CHAPTER FOUR

Governing by Public Relations

CHAPTER FIVE

The Spectacular City: News Organizations and the Representation of Catastrophe

CONCLUSION

Emerging Dangers in the Urban Environment

EPILOGUE

Together in the End

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1. City workers hose down bridges

2. Thousands swarm to North Avenue Beach

3. Makeshift public health

4. Children receiving emergency care

5. ComEd crew sprays a power generator

6. Water Wars

7. Maximum Heat Index and Excess Deaths, July 1995

8. Newspaper headlines track the death toll

9. Refrigerated trucks at Cook County Medical Examiners Office

10. United States Disaster Mortality, 1960–95

11. Age-Adjusted Heat-Related Death Rates per 100,000 Residents, by Sex

12. An exhausted worker at the morgue

13. Chief Medical Examiner Ed Donoghue

14. Who’s to Blame?

15. A police report for a decedent

16. Proportion of U.S. and Chicago Households with One Inhabitant

17. Proportion of U.S. and Chicago Elderly (65+) Living Alone

18. A senior citizen walking in the heat

19. An elderly man at home

20. Sleeping outdoors during the 1964 heat wave

21. Police remove a victim

22. Part I Crimes in Senior Housing, 1988–94

23. Chicago Community Areas with the Highest Heat-Related Mortality Rates and Highest Proportion of Elderly Persons Living Alone

24. Chicago Community Areas with the Highest Heat-Related Mortality Rates and Highest Violent Crime Rates

25. Chicago Community Areas with the Highest Heat-Related Mortality Rates and Highest Proportion of Persons Below Poverty Level

26. The original Sears Tower in North Lawndale

27, 28. Bombed Out: Vacant lots in North Lawndale

29. Ogden Avenue, North Lawndale

30. Reported Crimes per 100,000 Residents: Police Districts 10 and 11, 12–19 July 1995

31. Twenty-sixth Street, Little Village

32. The streets here are always busy

33. Street vendors and shoppers

34. A family relaxes outdoors in Little Village

35. Paramedics assist a colleague

36. Storing bodies in refrigerated trucks

37. Carting a victim into the Medical Examiners Office

38. Woman in front of sink with no water pressure

39. Spoiled food at a grocery store

40. Mayor Daley and commissioners at a press conference

41. Commission on Extreme Weather report cover

42. Reporter John Garcia on a hot night

43. Young people playing near an open fire hydrant

44. The spectacular city

45. A news image of police removing bodies

46. News camera operators at Cook County Morgue

47., 48. Newspaper front pages targeted to different audiences

49. Together in the end

TABLES

1. Total Heat-Related Deaths by Age and Race/Ethnicity: Chicago Residents

2. Age-Specific and Age-Adjusted Heat-Related Death Rates per 100,000 Population, by Race/Ethnicity: Chicago Residents, July 1995

3. Chicago Community Areas with the Highest Heat-Related Death Rates

4. Characteristics of North Lawndale and South Lawndale

5. Reported Overall Violent Crimes: Districts 10 and 11, 1994–95

6. Population in North Lawndale, 1950–90

7. Population in South Lawndale (Little Village), 1950–90

8. Chicago Community Areas with Lowest Heat Wave Death Rates

9. Full-Time Personnel for Chicago City Agencies, 1990s

10. Official Responses to the Heat Wave

11. Content Analysis of Heat Wave Stories: Chicago Tribune

12. Content Analysis of Heat Wave Stories: Chicago Sun-Times

Acknowledgments

I did not intend to study Chicago when I moved to Berkeley in 1995, but once I recognized my habit of writing about the metropolis from afar I understood that the city I had always claimed as my home had also made a claim on me. I am fortunate that so many other Chicagoans are similarly bound to the city. Their attachment is the basis for an unusually strong collective conscience, and I suspect that it is also the condition that makes conducting social research in Chicago such a meaningful experience. I have many people to thank for their contributions to this book, and none deserve more credit than those who actively participated in the research: the senior citizens, block club participants, community activists, political officials, city employees, medical workers, social service providers, and journalists who opened their doors to me and shared either memories of the heat wave or personal accounts of their everyday experiences in the city.

Sociology is better suited for explaining and understanding social processes and events than for denigrating or celebrating particular individuals or groups, so although many complex personalities and difficult social problems appear in this account, no singular heroes or villains come to light in the analysis I offer here. If the social autopsy of the 1995 heat wave uncovers some of Chicago’s hidden blights, it does so not to impugn or embarrass any people or institutions but to make sense of and call attention to emerging forms of isolation, deprivation, and vulnerability that deserve critical scrutiny. This book is both an invitation to consider the ways we live and die in the cities of today, and a challenge to imagine how we will transform and inhabit the cities of tomorrow.

It would have been impossible to conceive of this project—let alone to conduct the research for it—without the training I received as a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank my dissertation committee, Loïc Wacquant, Manuel Castells, Michael Rogin, Martín Sánchez-Jankowksi, and Margaret Weir, as well as two readers, Claude Fischer and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who acted as full-fledged committee members even though they were not formal participants. Lawrence Cohen, Gil Eyal, Neil Fligstein, Arlie Hochschild, Mike Hout, Tom Laqueur, and Sam Lucas added insight and support.

Fellow graduate students at Berkeley created an exciting intellectual environment. In particular, my thanks go to Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Daniel Dohan, Rodney Benson, Jeff Juris, Shai Lavi, Andrew Perrin, Onesimo Sandoval, Jessica Sewell, and Matt Wray for knowing how to mix criticism with compassion and companionship so that we could make it through our dissertations and live well in the process. Colleagues I got to know before arriving in California, especially Barbara Epstein, Sam Kaplan, David Lewis, and Louise Jezierski, provided wise counsel and friendship. The members of SAGS kept me on my toes while the rest of Berkeley rested, and made my small jumps forward feel like giant leaps.

Several institutions provided me with resources and the time, space, and critical attention that make scholarship possible. The early research and writing for this project were funded by fellowships from the Jacob Javits graduate fellowship program and the National Science Foundation, as well as small grants from the Berkeley Humanities Division and Phi Beta Kappa. An Individual Projects Fellowship from the Open Society Institute offered the final boost that I needed to continue my research and craft this book. I am grateful to OSI administrators Gail Goodman, Joanna Cohen, Gara LaMarche, JoAnn Mort, and Pamela Sohn for their support, and to OSI Fellows Jamie Kalven, Eyal Press, Jonathan Schorr, and Elaine Sciolino for helping me engage with the world outside of academe.

When I did my fieldwork in Chicago, Edward Lawlor welcomed me as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago’s Center for Health Administration Studies and introduced me to a network of local organizations concerned with health and aging. I spent six months in Paris at the Center for European Sociology of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where I learned new approaches to the study of politics, culture, and the media through seminars and discussions with Patrick Champagne, Remi Lenoir, Dominique Marchetti, and Pierre Bourdieu. I spent my last year in Berkeley working in ideal conditions at the Center for Urban Ethnography. I received excellent feedback from scholarly audiences at many academic events, including colloquia at the sociology departments of the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Chicago, New York University, Northwestern University, and the University of Lyon-Lumiere II; conference presentations at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1997 and the American Sociological Association meetings in 1998; and a public lecture in the Medicine, Markets, and Bodies series at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999. The influences of these institutions are apparent throughout this book.

I wrote the final version of the manuscript at Northwestern University, where colleagues in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Policy Research offered fresh perspectives that allowed me to see beyond the parameters of my initial work. Soon after I returned to Chicago in 2000, Arthur Stinchcombe gave me useful suggestions for strengthening the theoretical apparatus that holds the book together—sometimes, indeed, less is more. Jeff Manza delivered on his promise to read each chapter that I dropped at his office door and convinced me that the best days of public sociology might still be ahead of us. And although Mary Pattillo likes to say that I would have finished the book months earlier had we not gotten caught up in so many long conversations and debates, the final product is better because of what I learned during our exchanges. Other colleagues at Northwestern have provided valuable feedback on portions of the manuscript. Thanks go to Nicola Beisel, Fay Cook, Gary Alan Fine, Benjamin Frommer, Jennifer Light, Ann Shola Orloff, Ethan Shagan, and Wes Skogan for their many contributions, and to Ellen Berrey, Liz Raap, Scott Leon Washington, and Pete Ziemkiewicz for their expert research assistance.

A number of friends and colleagues outside Chicago have also given me trenchant criticism and advice. Jack Katz and Richard Sennett read the entire manuscript and helped me refine various arguments and ideas. Evelyn Brodkin, Jodi Cantor, Dalton Conley, David Grazian, Doug Guthrie, and Sudhir Venkatesh offered suggestions on individual chapters. Paul Dimaggio, Serge Halimi, and Paul Willis provided sharp editorial comments and substantive feedback in reviews of journal articles about the heat wave that I previously had published in Theory and Society 28 (1999), Ethnography 2 (2001), and Le Monde Diplomatique (1997). Alane Salierno Mason played a crucial role in sustaining this project by expressing interest in a book about the heat wave while I struggled through the early stages of the research.

My gratitude also extends to the people whose willingness to share data on the heat wave and Chicago helped me build the empirical foundations of this project. Foremost among them are Steve Whitman, former director of the Epidemiology Program at the Chicago Department of Public Health and now the director of the Urban Health Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital; and Edmund Donoghue, the Chief Medical Examiner of Cook County. These two men have done more than anyone to explain the events of July 1995, and their generosity enabled me to explore the social dimensions of the disaster. Other local scholars and institutions helped as well. The Office of the Cook County Public Administrator accommodated my requests for information and gave me access to materials uncovered in investigations of heat wave decedents. Celia Berdes and Madelyn Iris of the Buehler Center on Aging at Northwestern University facilitated my access to a database of elderly people living alone who wished to participate in research studies. Robert Sampson shared data on neighborhood collective efficacy from the Harvard School of Public Health’s Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and provided useful suggestions for thinking about community-level vulnerability. Jan Semenza offered data as well as an engaging account of how the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention carried out its research on the heat wave. Ron Theel and Trina Cieply at the Chicago Sun-Times helped assemble photographs from the newspaper archives; Neal Weisenberg and Fran Preston took time out from their busy jobs at ABC7 Chicago to make still images from ABC’s television news broadcasts. Abigail Silva and Suzanne Lagershausen worked with me to map the heat wave mortality and to trace spatial patterns with geographical software that I could not handle alone. I thank them for their assistance.

It has been a pleasure to work with the University of Chicago Press. Doug Mitchell, whose daughter was married in Chicago during the week of the heat wave, was fated to edit this book. Doug had an intuitive feel for this project from the moment I explained it to him, and his suggestions for how a social autopsy could take the temperature of the city were always productive. Robert Devens and Sandy Hazel deserve special thanks for their many literary interventions.

Finally, I would like to thank the close friends and family members who supported me throughout this project. Danielle Klinenberg, Edward Klinenberg, Rona Talcott, Herb Davis, Anne McCune, Matt Brown, Katerina Christopolous, Brickson Diamond, Adam Gross, Colin Hall, Giev Kashkooli, Tamar Kelber, Sheryl Kelber, Ronald Lieber, Barbara Messing, Melanie Nutter, Marquez Pope, and Audrey Prins-Patt have led a genuinely communal effort to see this book into print. Esther Bishop, Florence Klinenberg, and my late grandparents, Jerome and Muriel Klinenberg, Irving Bishop, and Martin Talcott, provided inspiration. Caitlin Zaloom, who in the course of living with me has developed her own first-hand knowledge of the pleasures and perils of Chicago and urbanism, has been a consistent source of encouragement, advice, inspiration, and love. Caitlin has been a collaborator on this project from the moment she arrived in the city, and her influence is evident on every page. During my work on this book, my friends and family have taught me a lesson that my research in Chicago has only reinforced: there is nothing more valuable than good company.

It is conventional among social scientists to assign pseudonyms to the participants in their research projects; I have followed that convention in identifying people whose statements and experiences were not matters of public record, such as seniors living alone, residents of the neighborhoods and hotel residences where I conducted fieldwork, and social service providers. The people named in this book—political officials and activists, published journalists and scientists, heat wave victims, and medical officials—were impossible to disguise, either because the significance of their accounts is related to the roles they played during the heat wave, or because they are already on record for their involvement in the event.

Preface to the Second Edition

Writing about an urban environmental disaster in 2015 is profoundly different than it was in 2000, when I finished work on the first edition of Heat Wave. A mere fifteen years ago, few social scientists recognized the significance of mounting evidence that the earth was experiencing a gradual warming trend, punctuated by period bursts of unusually damaging weather. Today, however, our knowledge and concern about climate change has given new meaning and significance to extreme weather events, and their heightened frequency, intensity, and impact make studying disasters, as well as learning about the social dimensions of vulnerability and resilience, especially important. In Chicago, one recently published scientific paper predicts, heat waves even more ferocious and lethal than the 1995 inferno will be annual events by 2080 unless current climate trends change.¹ In the new world we are entering, the gap between the everyday and the extreme is quickly slipping away.

I conducted most of the research for the book between 1995 and 2000, and although I had a longstanding interest in the environment and environmental justice, I didn’t yet see how the human experience of climate change fit into the sociological tradition. Sociology began in nineteenth-century Europe as a scientific inquiry into the social dynamics of human life in the modern world. From the outset, its leading practitioners, most notably Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, examined the most urgent and consequential issues of their time and place: industrialization and labor, urbanization and communities, rationalization and governance, religion and secularism, families and population growth. Had sociology been invented at the dawn of the twenty-first century, most of these topics would still be central to the discipline. But among the many new developments that would merit a place beside them, the climate crisis stands out as the most important. In the past decade, I’ve come to see it as the most significant and difficult problem for our species today.

As we now know, the uniquely human act of burning fossil fuels to power social innovations—from large-scale industrialization and industrial agriculture to urbanization and expanded consumption—has transformed the underlying conditions for all life on earth. The modern energy system is now deeply integrated into modern social systems, such as food production chains and electricity networks, and in the daily routines and practices of people throughout the world. For generations, the benefits of these systems appeared to outweigh the costs. But in recent years the cumulative toll of the greenhouse gasses that they have emitted has profoundly destabilized the climate, and with it, the social environment.

During the Holocene, the ten thousand years of relative climate stability preceding the Industrial Revolution, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was roughly 275 parts per million. At the time of this writing, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 397 parts per million, and without stringent restrictions on emissions and widespread adoption of renewable energy sources, it should reach 500 parts per million by 2050, or sooner. These figures are significantly higher than the 350 parts per million level that would raise surface temperatures more than two degrees Celsius and, as prominent scientists warned in a landmark Nature publication, threaten ecological life-support systems . . . and severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies.² Despite such dire warnings, the expansion of fossil fuel burning activities continues apace, and the crisis we’re creating is by no means an act of God.

During the years when I worked on Heat Wave, scientists, journalists, and policy makers thought about climate change speculatively; the transformation of the earth’s fragile ecological systems was something that might happen in a future we could not fully predict. Now, however, there’s overwhelmingly persuasive evidence that global warming is already happening. Consider, for instance, that I am writing these words during the 354th consecutive month in which the average surface temperature exceeded the twentieth-century norm, which means the last time the earth had experienced a below average monthly temperature was 1985.³ The odds of this hot weather recurring randomly, without an underlying transformation of the climate, are effectively zero. These sustained high temperatures have triggered changes in the ecosystems that sustain human and nonhuman life, most notably in warming ocean temperatures, rapidly melting polar ice caps, and steadily rising sea levels, which are already encroaching into densely settled areas. If mainstream scientific projections for sea level rise are accurate, hundreds of millions of people will be forced to move from low-lying coastal lands during the next century, and even more will be exposed to violence and deprivation related to food and water shortages. The process through which this conflict and this mass migration happens will become a central object of social science research, for the simple reason that it will also be a central challenge for states and societies across the planet.

The changing climate has already made life on earth more violent and unstable. The World Meteorological Organization reports that extreme weather events occurred nearly five times more often between 2000 and 2010 than between 1970 and 1980, with a far greater economic and human toll.⁴ Internationally, hurricanes and floods are responsible for most disaster damage, though the young twenty-first century has already produced a heat wave that killed approximately 70,000 people across Europe in 2003 and another that killed some 50,000 people in Russia in 2010, as well as droughts resulting in food insecurity and political instability in Africa and the Middle East.⁵ Hurricanes, which generate the most expensive property damage as well as the most spectacular images, get the headlines in the United States. We name them, we debate them, we study them, and we remember them for generations. But in most years heat waves are the nation’s most lethal form of extreme weather. They remain silent and invisible killers of silent and invisible people. And we ignore them at our peril.

To date, climate scientists have played the leading role in identifying the transformation of the earth’s environment and explaining how human behavior—specifically the production and consumption of carbon-based energy sources—has caused it. But now that we understand so much about the threat of global warming, the most urgent challenges belong to the social sciences: How and when will citizens develop high levels of concern about climate change, and will they collectively demand that political leaders take significant action to address it? What alterations in our social lives will be necessary to mitigate the effects of global warming? What role do cultural values play in our efforts to address the climate crisis before the damage is irreversible, and how will social conditions determine which people and places are most vulnerable to the coming storms?

Although these are unmistakably social scientific questions, sociology been painfully slow to address them. With notable exceptions, sociologists have treated the climate as secondary, at best, to the key conditions that shape modern life, and environmental sociology has long been a marginal subfield.⁶ The reasons for this run deep in the history of the behavioral sciences. Since Durkheim, the core project of sociology has involved establishing that the social determines all variety of outcomes, down to the most personal, individual decision of whether to end one’s own life.⁷ In the twentieth century, sociologists often aimed to demonstrate that their social explanations were more powerful than the natural causes that got more public attention. The social sciences denaturalized just about everything possible, including natural disasters and even nature itself.

I began the research for Heat Wave when I was a doctoral student in sociology at Berkeley, and my approach was shaped by this theoretical orientation to privilege the social. I had good reason. The models that scholars used to predict the human impact of extreme weather systems dramatically underestimated the mortality of the great Chicago heat wave. Climate scientists and public health researchers acknowledged that social factors had made the disaster far more deadly than they had anticipated, but they lacked the tools to identify them. Here was my warrant for sociological investigation. But where, and with what tools, was I to begin?

I conceived of the social autopsy as a technique for opening up the skin of the city and determining which of its institutional organs had broken down during the heat wave. Armed with the instruments of modern sociology, I examined all the likely sources of failure that the discipline’s theories suggested, from atomized individuals and fragile families to impoverished neighborhoods, mismanaged government agencies, and myopic media outlets. This protocol proved fruitful. During the years I spent doing research I discovered a great number of social facts that surprised me, including two changes—the incredible growth in the population of people who were living alone and the dangerous isolation of the most frail among them, and the declining levels of original reporting on city news in local media outlets—that motivated two subsequent book projects, Going Solo and Fighting for Air.

The section of Heat Wave that contributes most directly to the sociology of climate change comes in the second chapter, on race, place, and vulnerability. There, I try to move the debate about the risks of heat mortality from the individual-level risk factors for heat death that epidemiologists had already identified, such as having a working air conditioner or being socially isolated, to the question of why similarly situated neighborhoods fared so differently during the disaster.⁸ For the most part, the geography of heat-wave mortality was consistent with the city’s geography of segregation and inequality: eight of the ten community areas with the highest death rates were virtually all African American, with pockets of concentrated poverty and violent crime, places where old people were at risk of hunkering down at home and dying alone during the heat wave. But that’s not the whole story. Three of the ten neighborhoods with the lowest heat-wave death rates were also poor, violent, and predominantly African American. Which means that neither race, nor ethnic cultural practices and values, nor violence or poverty are sufficient to explain who lived and who died that week.

Heat Wave compares the experiences of two adjacent neighborhoods on the West Side of Chicago, North Lawndale and South Lawndale (otherwise known as Little Village), but my research included comparisons of adjacent neighborhoods in other parts of the city as well. Consider Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two adjacent neighborhoods on the hypersegregated South Side. Both were both 99 percent African American, with similar proportions of elderly residents. Both had high rates of poverty, unemployment, and violent crime. Englewood, like North Lawndale, proved to be one of the most perilous places during the disaster, with thirty-three deaths per hundred thousand residents. But Auburn Gresham’s death rate was only three per hundred thousand, making it, along with Little Village, far safer than many of the most affluent neighborhoods on Chicago’s North Side.

The key difference between neighborhoods like Auburn Gresham, Little Village, and others that are demographically similar turned out to be what I call the social infrastructure: the sidewalks, stores, public facilities, and community organizations that bring people into contact with friends and neighbors. The people of Englewood and North Lawndale were vulnerable not just because they were black and poor but also because their community had been abandoned. Between 1960 and 1990, Englewood lost about 50 percent of its residents and most of its commercial outlets, as well as its social cohesion. Auburn Gresham, by contrast, experienced no population loss during that period. In 1995, residents walked to diners and grocery stores. They knew their neighbors. They participated in block clubs and church groups. Residents there told me that during the heat wave they knew who was alone, who was old, and who was sick. They did wellness checks and encouraged neighbors to knock on each other’s doors—not because the heat wave was so exceptional, but because that’s what they always do when the weather is extreme.

The significance of these local social conditions is apparent every day, not only in disasters. In 1990, life expectancy in Auburn Gresham was five years higher than it was in Englewood. And during the severe heat waves that are likely to hit Chicago and other cities in the near future, living in a neighborhood like Auburn Gresham may be the rough equivalent of having a working air conditioner in each room.

Examining the conditions that make some places more resilient and others more vulnerable during extreme weather events is one way that sociologists can deepen understanding of life and death on a warming planet. But the social scientific investigation of climate change need not—and cannot—be an exclusively academic endeavor. In recent years a growing number of scholars have begun collaborating with planners, engineers, and architects, and together they are advancing ambitious projects to help cities attempt to ward off but also prepare for an age of extremes. I got involved in some of these efforts when I was living in Chicago and working on Heat Wave. But only recently, since Superstorm Sandy transformed life in my current hometown, New York City, did I discover how much social science research can contribute to interdisciplinary climate change mitigation and adaptation projects. To share this experience, I’ll take you on a brief ethnographic tour.

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, governments around the world have been investing in elaborate plans to promote climate security—protecting people, businesses, and critical infrastructure against weather-related calamities. Much of this work involves upgrading what engineers call lifeline systems: the network infrastructure for power, transit, and communications, which is crucial in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Some of the solutions are capital intensive and high tech. Some are low- or no-tech approaches, such as organizing communities so that residents know which of their neighbors are vulnerable and how to assist them. The fundamental threat to the human species is, of course, our collective inability to reduce our carbon emissions and slow the pace of climate change. Yet even if we managed to stop increasing global carbon emissions tomorrow, we would probably experience several centuries of additional warming, rising sea levels, and more frequent dangerous weather events. If our cities are to survive, we have no choice but to adapt, and social scientists must join other members of the scientific community who are guiding this process.

For most cities, genuine adaptation means preparing for the inevitable heat wave, deluge, or drought. The ocean is going to reclaim what we took from it, says Klaus Jacob, a Columbia University geophysicist who has advised New York City on how to manage sea-level rise, and whose climate models predict a gradual erosion of densely settled habitats in coastal areas around the world. Long before Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, he urged city leaders to learn from Rotterdam, which has a long history of flooding. After enduring a devastating storm surge in 1953, Rotterdam began building a series of dams, barriers, and seawalls as part of a national project called Delta Works, and five years ago the Dutch government provided funds for an upgrade, the Rotterdam Climate Proof Program. Arnoud Molenaar, who manages it, says his team realized that they could convert the water that comes into the city from the skies and the sea into blue gold. Before, we saw the water as a problem, Molenaar told me. In the Netherlands, we focused on how to prevent it from coming in. New York City focused on evacuation, how to get people out of the way. The most interesting thing is figuring out what’s between these approaches: what to do with the water once it’s there.

In 2005, Rotterdam hosted the Second International Architecture Biennale. The theme was The Flood. Designers from around the world presented plans for how cities could cope with water in the future, and when the exhibition ended, Molenaar’s team set out to implement those that would have immediate practical value. Rotterdam is now experimenting with an architecture of accommodation: it has a floating pavilion in the city center, made of three silver half spheres with an exhibition space that’s equivalent to four tennis courts; a water plaza that serves as a playground most of the year but is converted into a water-storage facility on days of heavy rainfall; a floodable terrace and sculpture garden along the city’s canal; and buildings whose façades, garages, and ground-level spaces have been engineered to be waterproof.

Smart designs have improved other parts of the Netherlands’ critical infrastructure. Its communications network features the fastest Internet speed in Europe, and, with IBM, it has built a system for water and energy management. It also has a resilient power grid, designed to withstand strong winds and heavy rain. In the United States, most distribution lines are elevated on wooden poles and exposed to falling tree branches; in the Netherlands, the lines are primarily underground and encased in water-resistant pipes. The Dutch grid is circular, rather than being a system of hub and spokes, so that if a line goes out in one direction, operators can restore power by bringing it in from another source. And it’s interconnected to the grids in neighboring countries, which gives the system additional capacity when there are local problems. This network architecture is more resilient in ordinary times, too. In Holland, the average duration of total annual power outages is twenty-three minutes, compared with two hundred and fourteen minutes in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York—not including outages from disasters.

After Sandy, there was a five-day blackout in lower Manhattan, because the walls protecting Con Ed’s substation along the East River, at twelve and a half feet above the ground, were eighteen inches too low to stop the storm surge and prevent the consequent equipment explosions. When I asked Jacob about this, he threw up his hands in exasperation. Just put it on a high platform and use more underwater cable, he said. We’ve had it available for a long time now. These are just moderate investments, in the millions of dollars. It’s a small price to pay for more resilience. But New York is just one of countless municipalities that has neglected to update its vital systems to meet the demands of a hotter, wetter planet. Another major heat wave would likely send Chicago into darkness again, too.

Here it’s worth pointing out that engineers and urban planners do not determine whether and in what ways a city or nation invests in vital systems infrastructure. Governments do, and a variety of social factors, from the values and interests of citizens, civic groups, and corporate lobbies to the standing of climate science in a given polity, shape the political will of officials to update energy and transit networks for an age of global warming. In the United States, widespread demand for low taxes, combined with massive spending on wars abroad and the criminal justice system at home, has left scarce resources available for modernizing the infrastructure. Moreover, a well-funded, highly organized public relations campaign to deny discredit climate science has discouraged elected leaders from addressing global warming, even in places hit hard by disaster and drought.⁹ Domestically and in international relations, too, the American response to climate change has been marked by complacency, at best, and usually by obstructionism.

The island nation of Singapore—where 5.2 million people are packed into 710 square kilometers of land, much of which is perilously close to sea level—offers a counterexample. Singapore began adapting to dangerous weather thirty years ago, after a series of heavy rains during monsoon seasons caused repeated flooding in the low-lying city center. The country has always had a difficult relationship with water. Its geography makes it vulnerable to heavy seasonal rains and frequent flooding, but there is never a sufficient supply of usable water, and in recent years Singapore’s dependency on Malaysian water sources has led to political conflicts. Climate change, with its rising sea levels and increase in heavy rains, threatens the city-state’s stability. But Singapore’s government also sees this as an opportunity.

The Marina Barrage and Reservoir, which opened in 2008, is at the heart of Singapore’s two-billion-dollar campaign to improve drainage infrastructure, reduce the size of flood-prone areas, and enhance the quality of city life. It has nine operable crest gates, a series of enormous pumps, and a ten-thousand-hectare catchment area that is roughly one-seventh the size of the country. The system not only protects low-lying urban neighborhoods from flooding during heavy rains; it also eliminates the tidal influence of the surrounding seawater, creating a rain-fed supply of freshwater that currently meets 10 percent of Singapore’s demand. Moreover, by stabilizing water levels in the Marina basin, the barriers have produced better conditions for water sports. The Marina’s public areas, which include a sculpture garden, a water playspace, a green roof with dramatic skyline vistas, and the Sustainable Singapore Gallery, bolster the city’s tourist economy as well.

The Marina is just one of Singapore’s adaptation projects. The Mass Rapid Transit system has elevated the access points for the underground rail system to at least a meter above the highest recorded flood levels. To minimize damage, the Public Utility Board has improved its drainage systems. In the 1970s, thirty-two hundred hectares of land were flood prone; today, only forty-nine hectares are. Singapore is further reducing its dependence on imported water by building new facilities for desalinating seawater and developing technology for using reclaimed and treated wastewater in industrial settings. To reduce its energy consumption, the Building and Construction Authority requires that all new structures be insulated with materials designed to retain cool temperatures. Today, Singapore is better prepared not only for extreme weather but also for meeting future demands for power and water as its population grows.

Rotterdam’s and Singapore’s arrangements can’t simply be replicated elsewhere, but their ambition and foresight is exemplary. After Sandy, New York paid the price for its lack of preparation. In recent decades, American utility companies have spent relatively little on research and development. One industry report estimates that, in 2009, research-and-development investments made by all US electrical-power utilities amounted to at most $700 million, compared with $6.3 billion by IBM and $9.1 billion by Pfizer. In 2009, however, the Department of Energy issued $3.4 billion in stimulus grants to a hundred smart-grid projects across the United States, including many in areas that are prone to heat waves and hurricanes. The previous year, Hurricane Ike had knocked out power to two million customers in Houston, and full restoration took nearly a month. When the city received $200 million in federal funds to install smart-grid technology, it quickly put crews to work. Nearly all Houston households have been upgraded to the new network, one that should be more reliable when the next storm arrives.

Smart grids are in the early stages, but already they have several advantages over the old power systems. Digital meters, which are installed in households and at key transmission points, automatically generate real-time information about both consumers and suppliers, allowing utility providers to detect failures immediately, and sometimes also to identify the cause. This means that, after an outage, operators don’t need to wait for calls from angry customers or field reports from crews. Moreover, smart grids are flexible, capable of being fed by disparate sources of energy, including

Reviews for Heat Wave

[jonerthon-437513 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read other Klinenberg titles, and this is his most technical of any I've completed to date, but maintained his style of argument. The 1995 Chicago heat wave was a news maker for its sudden and high death toll, and this analysis was extremely thorough. The argument for how some Chicago neighborhoods experienced more fatalities during the several day heat wave, and how Chicago itself fared so much worse than other nearby cities, is built on an iterative basis by reviewing the experiences and actions of many, many stakeholders. You get to hear from seniors that barely survived, local and federal government staff, journalists that covered the stories, and more. If you aren't a sociologist, you might not be seeking such a complete story but I now feel well-versed in the whole incident and its aftermath.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A thorough, comprehensive scholarly glimpse at a social catastrophe that no one considers in the same light as a terrorist attack or natural disaster, but killed over 700 people in the city of Chicago.

[askelmore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When you think about disasters that caused a whole bunch of deaths in one swoop in the US in the last 25 or 30 years (outside of a war), you probably think about the September 11 attacks, which killed 2,977 in the US. If I were to ask you what the next biggest disaster in terms of deaths, you’d probably also get it right: Hurricane Katrina and its 1,833 deaths. But do you know what caused the third greatest number of deaths in the past 25 years?

Surprisingly (to me, at least) it was the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which took 733 lives over the course of about a week.

It’s been hotter than usually in the Pacific Northwest, where I live. We had multiple days in a row above 90, which may not sound bad to those of you used to sweltering summers, but in general folks out here don’t have air conditioning (and if you do have it but you don’t have the money for an electric bill of gargantuan proportions, you might just leave it off). My apartment in the evenings was often still in the mid-upper 80s, and we don’t even get any direct sunlight (thank goodness for north-facing windows). I also work in public health emergency preparedness, so I have an extra special interest in things that cause a whole lot of people to get sick and die at once.

Author Dr. Klinenberg is originally from Chicago, and earned his PhD in Sociology at UC Berkely in 2000. Heat Wave is his dissertation, exploring not just the health causes of those 700 deaths, but the social causes. His thesis is that the hot days didn’t kill these people alone; the systems society has set up (or not set up) instead failed many of these people in a complicated way that would be dangerous to ignore if we seek to avoid it in the future.
Much of his work focuses on comparing two neighborhoods that are very similar in some of the basic demographics, and even have the same microclimate, but had VERY different death rates. In one neighborhood (95% black), 40 out of 100,000 residents died in the heat wave; in the neighborhood next door (86% Latino), only 4 out of 100,000 residents died. That is a huge difference, and one that we should try to explain.

Beyond this, he looks at the role of city government and how they responded (or failed to respond), from the front-line police officers who were tasked with community policing but didn’t check in on the community, through the fire chiefs who ignored warnings from their staff that they should have more ambulances available, to the health commissioner who didn’t really ‘get’ that something was amiss. Dr. Klinenberg also explores the role the media played in not treated the story with the gravity it deserved until late into the heat wave.

Even if you aren’t interested in public health preparedness, or aren’t into sociological profiles, I think you might find this book to be quite fascinating. I’m impressed with the readability of what is essentially someone’s dissertation, and I think I can learn a lot that will be helpful to me in professional life.

This book got me back on track for my cannonball read, too, so I’m quite grateful for that. I haven’t finished a book in nearly three weeks. Between going to Canada for five World Cup matches (including the final – woo!), my computer dying, and learning that my back-up system failed, plus the aforementioned ridiculous heat wave we had, I’ve mostly wanted to just sit on my ass and play games on my phone. But no more! I’m back to reading and it feels fantastic.

[dkuehn_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A great book, in particular the first two chapters, that made me rethink the role of disasters and chronic conditions

[tsryan_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is popular sociology at its best. Klinenberg conducts a "social autopsy" of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which left over 700 people dead. Asking how such a tragedy could have occurred in a city with modern amenities, he finds that those who suffered from the heat wave were disproportionately the poor and the elderly. Popular press accounts reported on the number dead without acknowledging that those who died did so because of deeply rooted inequalities. By systematically mapping who was affected, Klinenberg is able to touch on larger matters of social justice and equality in the U.S.