17 minute read
with Ananth Udupa Paul Coseo
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.
Ananth Udupa: The principal question around this year’s issue is the methods to which we interact with each other and understanding the intricacies of community, but also the approach towards design. So, what is the importance of connection and architecture and also the relevance of interdisciplinary collaboration design for you?
Paul Coseo: My background is in meteorology, landscape architecture, and urban planning. And so, I’m certainly influenced by all of those professions and the experiences that I’ve had within them. I see the work we do as designers as less about creating, especially from an education and research perspective, and more towards a co-creating process with the community, where it creates a leveling field with a horizontal power structure putting community members on equal footing in terms of their expertise with designers. One key skill designers need is to be able to have the ability to build relationships. Like I was just in a meeting just before that came on here. Those relationships then allow you access to the critical information you need as the designer to help then use some of the skills that you, you have maybe a bit overemphasized in the past, spatial skills, constructing buildings or landscapes or other environments. I think there’s a movement towards recognizing the fact that we can design those relationships, we can design those connections, as part of the work that we do in more meaningful ways. We can co-create the built environment with people, from housing to communities to cities. The access to the critical information that we need is really through those relationships.
I completely agree with that, and also I feel research into urban climates is a specific topic that acts on these grander topics of inclusion. Could you speak more on the application of your research on urban heat island and heat vulnerability?
I’ve learned a lot of my lessons through being part of this larger conversation around extreme heat and how extreme heat affects people. Much of the work probably, since the 1960s around urban heat island and understanding how heat affects cities has been around remote sensing and instrumentation taking surface temperatures air temperatures and now increasingly means raising temperatures Less work has been done on people’s personal thermal comfort and how that ranges within our communities. For instance, people who have to use public transportation or don’t have access to air conditioning, in many cases, are also the people who cannot afford quality housing with insulation and HVAC. So, they are exposed to high air temperatures, particularly in the desert and have to spend their time, if they don’t have a car, walking. That accumulation of heat is a real challenge, and we have, as researchers, access to information, air temperature, surface temperature, mean radiant temperature, and we also have public health records that we can look at in terms of county-level and statelevel data, going down to the zip code. So, I am seeing a need in the urban climate research community to do more community-based, experiential documentation more thoroughly.
There’s a project that was created a few years ago, which is still going on today, called Nature’s Cooling System. One of the key partners was the Nature Conservancy along with ASU and some other nonprofits. But, they came together to work in three different neighborhoods in Edison Eastlake, in Mesa Care, and then a neighborhood in South Phoenix to do some of the hard community work with meetings, organizing, and building around problem identification and solutions. Coming from the outside, we might think that tree planting is the best solution but you might need something else specific to the participating communities. What that project showed is that there was a diversity in both the identified problems of heat and the experience of thermal comfort in those neighborhoods as people move throughout their daily experience.
And then that the solutions were different, the strategies to cool the neighborhood were necessarily different and you know that wouldn’t be a big surprise for people who do community development or planning. The contextual nature of a problem is critical and known as why you do community work in terms of design and planning. With heat, it’s maybe less acknowledged and it’s becoming more and especially because heat is very subjective. We all have different thermal sensitivity, in terms of our physiology and psychology even. So there are real complexities that we’re just starting to learn about. And then people live experiences so different so all those things come together to require that work that’s more community embedded as part of how we designed cooler neighborhoods.
A lot of what you just spoke on ties into your service-based design projects in academia. You had done some work in Detroit with a service-learning studio with the University of Michigan and I had read the journal article which was published regarding it. So, I was wondering if you could talk about that studio and also what came out of it.
Yes, that project was very influential in defining what I do here at ASU. At the time, I was in my Ph.D. as a doctoral student and was lucky enough to be a part of a cohort of doctorate students that were part of a fellowship, and one of the things we had to do for the fellowship was a community service activity. Some of the other cohorts before us had done international types of service and we felt pretty strongly that our backyard was often ignored, and that there were environmental justice issues that people at the University of Michigan didn’t even know about. They might know about someplace in Africa, but they don’t know what was happening in Detroit. We felt pretty strongly that that was wrong; the people needed to know about their place and their role in that place. So, we worked with my advisor, Larissa Larson, who headed up a class and we created a new class that took a year, I think, to create the class called sustainable neighborhoods. Dr. Larson led the class and then she had five Ph.D. students that were sort of the TAs. We helped construct the class; it was eight weeks at the University of Michigan to do prep work. We had an application process, so 70 students applied, and we took 25, making sure it was a diverse team of students.
We had weekly classes from January through March before spring break, and then we went to and stayed in Detroit for two weeks in May. And we were partnered with a local nonprofit, Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision, which was working with Dr. Larson for a long while. So, we were privileged enough to be able to go into that into the Community called Del Rey, which has the most polluted air in terms of air pollution and is the most polluted zip code in Michigan and help that community. We set up two workshops; we had stations within the Community Center and since we were there for about two weeks, we went through and documented how many vacant lots were there, how many homes that were abandoned that and were still standing and they didn’t have any mapping of any of that. Mapping is kind of a critical piece of a lot of this work because things are just not documented in communities and especially this community was low income and marginalized so they didn’t have a lot of resources. And so, we were able to come in and provide those resources and the students were able to then learn about sustainable neighborhoods in a grounded approach.
What you’ll see in that article is how their conceptions of sustainability changed once the students were taught by community members. When they went and participated in those conversations, they realized that the biggest sustainability issue wasn’t air pollution or lack of trees, but rather the trash pickup, the lighting of the street. In that neighborhood, the drug crisis hit that neighborhood so hard that neighbors resorted to sometimes burning down their neighbors’ abandoned houses because the city wouldn’t take them down and they were drug dens. So, there were a lot of pragmatic lessons that the students learned as a part of that. And I think that’s why I teach the way that I do because I understand that it’s really important to learn these theories, but it’s also important to ground them in an experience of a community
The product of that studio was certainly the students learning and grounding their perspectives on sustainability because of this project. But the other piece was for the community. In service-learning models, there should be a reciprocal outcome. So, for the students, it was that and for the community, it was really that they had documentation of their neighborhood and a relative plan that was developed with the process for the new bridge
that was coming in that was going to cost 2 billion dollars. We were in partnership with an environmental group called Community Benefits Agreement who said that if we were going to use public funds to invest in a neighborhood, in this case investing in the infrastructure of a bridge, the community that’s burdened by that bridge, which already has a lot of air pollution problems, should benefit as well. So the contract is between the community coalition that comes around that gets developed and the bridge, in this case, the state of Michigan or the federal government, that was building the bridge to take a portion of the cost of the bridge and invest in community infrastructure. Which could mean jobs, air pollution controls for the trucks, or new trees. So, we came up with a relatively simple plan that documented what a community wanted, so that they could use that then as their “ask” from the State in terms of the community benefits agreement. And these community benefit agreements have been done in other parts of the country, but the outcome was to provide the neighborhood with the necessary documentation they need for their ask. That’s a
I would like to pivot to discuss your work in Hawaii as well. Especially the research and community outreach with indigenous knowledge systems and water systems. What was the project about?
lesson I take away from that experience is that the important work that we do as academics is not only to teach our students and show them different kinds of community process ways but then also provide the key resource for the community to embed and have a better quality of life, to understand issues like heat or air pollution.
The translation to Phoenix would be that you can drive down some of these streets and some of these extremely hot neighborhoods and see that there are no trees: it’s no “aha” moment when you know it’s hot. But, the work that we’re trying to do here is combining all the different measures of heat and really show that this is a public health problem and people are dying and people are suffering and also they’re spending more money. So even just documenting that hopefully makes decision-makers pay attention and certainly morally, they should, because these are dangerous neighborhoods in many cases for heat. I’ve also learned when you’re working with communities as well, it’s a delicate balance that we as academics and people at the university have to be held accountable by the community as well so that we’re not doing things that are extractive. That’s why there’s a focus on trust, reciprocity, and accountability for what we’re doing and how we work. I think we always need to be reflective of our work and what kind of potential harm we could potentially have as part of the process.
For me, I’m a constant learner. I see myself more in this role now than I did before explicitly because of my work in Hawaii and that sort of continues and the work that I’ll describe in a second. It is sort of a coincidence that we started to work in Hawaii. Some partners were interested at ASU and we got matched with some grants and had some studios that went over. To the partnering nonprofit’s credit, they had a very strong understanding of how community work should be done and with an approach of listening. For me, we were outsiders in terms of Hawaii, but it also made me realize that we’re almost always outsiders in the work we do as architects and designers. Being always that learner on that person that needs to be educated in terms of how the neighborhood works and so going to Hawaii. That was emphasized by our community partner, who said that you certainly can ask questions, but this is really for you to listen. So, we went on a listening tour in and around Honolulu and it was amazing. It was the first time that I had been in a space where the western approaches to design and understanding and language were not predominant.
The Hawaiian language and concepts were at the forefront of the way that they work, and what I learned is that it was, at least since 1975, when that development occurred, the reemergence of Hawaiian culture and language and concepts and the integration of that into how people work in Hawaii was very influential in my journey toward how I’m learning and how I work.
I want to learn from that and start to work in that space here at ASU. One thing I have learned, as well, that, as a white guy, the way I can kind of translate that to Arizona is to use my you know white power privilege to make
space for that type of work here by others, by our indigenous architects, designers, and members of the community. So, that’s what I’ve started to do in the work that we’re doing with the City of Tempe. Elevating the necessity to do that is something that I can do now. I certainly can’t do the work but I can be an ally in that work; that’s what I’ve learned, you know, particularly working in Hawaii. We’ve been there since 2016 and we’re still working there. We’re part of a NOAH grant and we’re working with the Manoa Heritage Center, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and in a partnership with some other folks that are based there. And we have been working with a Teachers professional development grant for K through 12 on environmental issues in the watershed and thinking about STEM. The University of Hawaii in Manoa has developed a new type of stem that adds in social science and sense of place to that and this is part of the foundation of the program they do these “learning journeys” where all of us are both teachers and learners and so that role can go back and forth, and we don’t have to have a hierarchical sort of system that we’re always learning. So, we’ve been on a learning journey and then trying to bring that back and that concept of a learning journey work, we might be into trying to integrate that into our work with the city of Tempe on heat. So you can see sort of the cross-pollination between all these different projects and how it always seems messy and unintentional and in many cases that is right. I think whatever we’re doing sticks with us and they’re always tapping me on the shoulder and saying “you remember you did that right?”, and then the things that maybe aren’t as important, just fall away over time.
Thank you so much for your time and words. It’s very inspiring also to see how rooted in policy and community your work is. Rooting the practice and education in place within the community is a very powerful and optimistic tool. I have one last question for you. Connection has become somewhat of a hot topic because of the various global crises and moving virtual. How has being online changed your work, specifically with the various communities you collaborate with?
I love this question because I continually think about this and I, when we went online on March 16 of last year, I said to my class that this is going to disrupt and change our relationships. I didn’t realize how long it would be, I had maybe a sense it wouldn’t be the two weeks as he would have told us it was going to be, but it’s interesting as I’ve had projects that have gone on where I’ve never met the person in real life, just through Zoom. I think there are going to be things that we keep from this moment. I’ve had some faculty say to me when we’ve had conversations about this that there is an intimacy to Zoom that’s different than meeting in person. And maybe it’s because you’re in my house and kind of coming into my space, as I’m coming into your space which is different than how we normally teach where we go into a common space. I think we’re going to have, I think, a new mode that we’re more comfortable with; we’re all forced to do it. And, so it won’t be so strange to just jump online to be with someone and that it is more normalized and that everyone had to do it. Even the oldest Professor had to figure it out, and so, there’s that sort of change as part of it. Particularly for design, it is place-based, and we do, you know, want to visit and be in the place and understand the place and you can’t get the same understanding if you’re remote. We’ve been trying to do this for different projects and you just have to because of the situation we’re in. But sometimes, I’ll go to the site for them and I’ll give a virtual field trip where I’ll go and have a 360-degree camera and show and talk about what I’m experiencing. It doesn’t replace the experience of a place and so that’s something that I think needs to stay. There’s a whole sensory experience that you have: it’s the temperature, the radiation, the sound, the smells. All of that is critical and certainly, we can visually see a place but there’s the rest of it that falls away if you can’t be there in person. And that goes for being in person together, where you’re able to kind of talk through things in real-time in a real place. I went to a site with a student yesterday who’s doing a project on one of the traffic islands or one of the immediate islands in or boulevard islands in Mill Ave as part of her project and she had as part of it, some stormwater coming in from a street and we went there, and realized we couldn’t do that because the slope was wrong So, you can maybe get that from a detailed survey but you can quickly get it when you’re out there at the site and experience that place.
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