Dr. Zoé Hamstead is an Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC-Berkeley in the College of Environmental Design. Zoé’s research keywords are: Environmental planning; climate planning; sustainability and resilience; environmental and climate justice; geographic and spatial analysis; urban policy and political economy; environmental governance; community engagement.

Urban planning strategies to address heat-driven health inequities are oriented around reshaping the outdoor built environment in order to promote cooling. Studies informing where heat mitigation investments should be made rely upon meteorological detection in these built environments. In so doing, they illustrate distributive heat injustices. Such ‘heat studies,’ however, rarely investigate the experiential qualities of thermal landscapes that people inhabit as they go about their daily lives. Thus, there is little understanding of the processes and practices through which people experience thermal suffering, or where and how their struggles manifest beyond distributive injustice concerns.