Research | Healthy Urban Environments

Summary

This project builds off the HUE project Heat and Health Maps for Decision Making in Tempe and connects it to the City-University effort with Cool Kids, Cool Places, Cool Futures/Neighborhood Justice in Tempe, to bring decision making approaches (using integrated heat, health, and equity data) for critical equitable urban cooling infrastructures (that link locations with corridors to each other) to the regional level. The overall goal of our project is to advance effective community resilience networks by facilitating regionally oriented and equity-centered conversations that connect practitioners and data with HUE solutions. A series of HUE-DT co-created workshops were conducted in summer of 2022, which galvanized a cross-generational group of partners’ wisdom, henceforth referred to as the Partnership working group. The Partnership includes Tempe and Phoenix city staff, a subgroup of the AZ Heat Preparedness and Resilience Workgroup, representatives of ASU’s Decision Theater (DT), HUE, and representatives of Tempe’s Cool Kids/ Neighborhood Justice (CK/NJ) project.

The vision for the co-created data story webtool would help us to change the existing discourse and actions of resilience to extreme heat from individual resilience to people-centered community and regional resilience approaches driven by practitioners and informed by useful data products to more effectively deploy equitable urban cooling solutions. The use of coordinated data for regional equity prioritization for heat preparedness connected with a solutions set for resilience is underdeveloped in our region. HUE is partnering with ASU’s Decision Theater (DT) to develop a web tool that can begin to fill this gap and grow into something larger – a regional data-informed authority driven by a community of practitioners to help coordinate heat community preparedness and resilience solutions between utilities, tribal nations, cities, NGOs, and service providers. These workshops, centered around conversations with practitioners, can advance regional articulation on the structure of communities of practice, data, solutions, and institutions needed in our region.