Paul Coseo a conversation with Ananth Udupa
Dr. Coseo is an Assistant Professor, Sustainability Scientist, and Licensed Landscape Architect at Arizona State University s (ASU) The Design School. He is an optimistic designer and researcher with a love of urban landscapes and weather. Growing up in metro Detroit, he witnessed how social forces drive not only the development of great public spaces but also urban decline that leads to extreme environmental inequity. At ASU, he examines the intersection of urban climate and design through 1) ecological, 2) climate justice, and 3) social learning lenses. His background in meteorology, landscape architecture, and urban planning allows him to not only focus on the drivers of extreme temperatures in cities (i.e. driven by the built environment and global climate change), but more importantly on the strategies to create more thermally comfortable and equitable cities. Paul argues for pushing past the term mitigation or strategies to simply reduce temperature extremes to a new concept of Urban Climate Design that advocates more holistically designing better and more moderate urban climates for cities. Urban Climate Design moves past simply being less bad and moves toward improving a city s thermal environment, quality of life, health, and equity of thermal outcomes. Thus, Urban Climate Design involves issues of justice through equitable, inclusive, and accessible social learning design and research processes. His research areas extend from the analysis of social and ecological drivers of extreme temperatures to design processes that address those drivers to monitoring of implemented strategies.
