Climate Change and the Future of Cities

This is an Archive of a Past Event

What can cities do about climate change? How can they help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create more sustainable forms of collective life? How can they protect vulnerable people and places from the outbursts of extreme weather that are becoming ever more likely to arrive? And can they adapt to global warming without making the world even more unequal? In this talk, 2016-17 CASBS fellow Eric Klinenberg shows how social science helps answer these urgent questions. Drawing on his own research, including an influential article on climate adaptation in the New Yorker, as well as his experience serving as Research Director of the federal government’s Rebuild By Design competition for rebuilding after hurricane Sandy, Klinenberg will examine innovative urban climate projects across the planet and offer surprising solutions for some of the most challenging problems of our time.

Eric Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, as well as research director of the federal government’s Rebuild by Design competition. He previously was a CASBS fellow during the 2007-08 academic year. Klinenberg is the author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (Penguin, 2013), Fighting for Air (Holt, 2008), Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago, 2nd ed., 2015), and, with Aziz Ansari, of Modern Romance (Penguin, 2015). He is also the editor of Climate Change and the Future of Cities (Duke, 2016).

In addition to his scholarly work, Klinenberg has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Le Monde Diplomatique, The London Review of Books, and the radio program This American Life.