Katherine Lieberknecht

community-centered climate planning

while addressing past inequities preparing for new climate futures

KATHERINE LIeBERKNECHT

As a kid growing up in Austin, my elementary school years overlapped with the tail end of desegregation bussing. From 1980 to 1986, kids from whiter, wealthier West Austin areas took turns with students from poorer, more diverse East Austin neighborhoods being bussed across town in an effort to finally integrate Austin’s public schools. Although Austin’s traffic wasn’t terrible then, we still had more than two hours on the school bus, roundtrip, before returning home again each day — so there was a lot of time to stare out the window and daydream. As a fourth grader, I didn’t have the words or theoretical frameworks to describe the patterns of inequality and disparity that I saw each day on my school-bus transect. However, I do remember observing houses becoming smaller and in more need of repair, creeks changing from green waterways to concrete channels, and storefronts shifting from abundant supermarkets to modest convenience stores. I also recall, as we drove east, front yards becoming more interesting: thriving vegetable gardens, neatly swept dirt yards with patio furniture arranged in clusters, year-round Christmas lights, and homemade yard art. And when my family and I occasionally drove back across town to my elementary school in the evenings for programs and events, I watched how these front yards became epicenters of community life: families and friends barbecuing, sharing meals, playing games, splashing in sprinklers.

More than thirty years later, my own kids attend Austin’s public schools, which are now more segregated than when I was in grade school.1 The city itself is one of the most economically segregated metropolitan areas in the US, and Austin has experienced the fastest rate of Black resident outmigration of any rapidly growing US city.2 Gentrification and displacement intensify still-unresolved infrastructure inequity, ranging from housing and food security to sidewalk conditions.3 This infrastructure inequity has been in place since at least the de facto segregation codified by Austin’s 1928 city plan,4 and it remains almost as severe as when I peered out of my school bus window.5

What has changed is that, today, we are preparing for an Austin where residents will experience hotter and drier summers, more intense flood events, and more exposure to air pollution from wildfire. These risks are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change. Although no place is fully prepared for the damage to life, economy, and property that the climate crisis will cause, residents of neighborhoods still experiencing the legacy of inequitable infrastructure will suffer disproportionately from climate change. For example, research I coauthored with School of Architecture students (PhD alumna Deidre Zoll and MSCRP alumna Katherine Castles) and faculty (Dr. Junfeng Jiao) found that Black,

FIG 1 Conceptual model for the codesigned climate planning data portal. Image credit: Jenny Gray Nelson.

Latinx, and mobile-home neighborhoods in the Houston metropolitan area disproportionately suffered more damage from Hurricane Harvey.6 While many factors likely contribute to these disparate outcomes, scholars have found strong links between climate injustice and inadequate infrastructure.7

Although I have no illusions about the persistence of Austin’s, and other cities, inequitable built environments, I believe that researchers, practitioners, and residents’ current work to make climate mitigation and adaptation planning more equitable offers an opportunity to reimagine human settlements, reallocate investment, and retroactively address conditions that have led to disparate effects of the climate crisis on marginalized populations.8 Specifically, the City of Austin’s efforts to center climate adaptation around equity — and, in particular, its work to pilot climate adaptation planning in the Austin neighborhoods of Dove Springs and Rundberg — offer one pathway to address the legacies of Jim Crow infrastructure that amplify climate risk today. I’ve had the privilege of being a small part of this work through a National Science Foundation-funded research project based in the Dove Springs neighborhood in Southeast Austin. Our team of UT Austin faculty and student researchers is collaborating with neighborhood residents, the City of Austin Office of Sustainability, and the community-based organization Go Austin! Vamos Austin! (GAVA) to advance climate disaster preparedness while increasing residents’ participation in climate adaptation strategies.

Dove Springs, along with the rest of Austin, is located in “Flash Flood Alley,” an area of Central Texas recognized globally for its intense flooding following seasonal rainstorms.9 In Dove Springs, these floods have intensified in frequency and intensity due, in part, to the region’s record-breaking growth, which contributes to the ever-expanding hardscape of rooftops and pavement added to Austin each year. In addition, scientists project that the climate crisis will amplify Austin’s “feast or famine” rainfall patterns, resulting in increased rain events matched by more severe and frequent droughts, higher temperatures, and increased risk of wildfire.10 All of these climate risks will result in negative health and economic outcomes for Dove Springs residents. However, given the severity of flooding — the neighborhood regularly experiences floods that result in property damage and, during larger storms, even drownings— residents and community organizers have prioritized flood preparedness and adaptation Fig 1.

As a result, a few years ago, neighborhood residents told staff at our community partner GAVA that they thought it would be helpful to have an online portal where neighbors could access resources and information to help them prepare for, respond to, and recover from floods and other disasters. In particular, residents wanted a place where they could easily store information and documents at risk of being lost during disasters as well as a single location where they could, in real time, obtain information needed to respond to these events. At the same time, City of Austin staff identified a need for more localized information about floods and other climate-related events in hopes of incorporating this local knowledge into climate adaptation planning. For example, although the City of Austin has a suite of adaptation strategies, such as installing rain gardens to absorb floodwaters and planting trees to increase shade and reduce heat events, staff believed that more nuanced, finer-grained information was key to successful climate adaptation planning and implementation Fig 2. For instance: Where are the stretches of sidewalk or bus stops that are so hot in midAugust that residents hesitate to use them, thereby limiting access to needed services? Which stormwater drains always back up during large rain events, causing localized flooding, property damage, and the potential for mosquito habitat? Although existing data and models help the City identify these problem spots, City staff felt confident that information coming directly from neighborhood residents would help improve climate adaptation planning, design, and outcomes.

Neighborhood residents and city staff’s valuing of this information dovetails with planning theory, which acknowledges that local knowledge held by residents contributes to more robust planning solutions.11 But how do we, as researchers and practitioners, incorporate local knowledge into the complex decision making and implementation process that prepares communities for the climate crisis as we simultaneously work to reverse it? Our research collaboration envisions a process for community-centered climate planning that values the knowledge and experiences that residents hold and then uses that information to shape planning strategies.12 This approach builds on the use of public participation in environmental planning, where resident involvement has been found to improve outcomes.13 In addition, increased participation of frontline communities — communities experiencing the climate crisis firsthand —  in the planning and design of climate solutions will increase equity and contribute to better results.14

When our UT Austin team reached out to the City of Austin and GAVA to ask if they would join a proposal for a National Science Foundation Smart & Connected Communities grant targeted at combining social and technological solutions for disaster preparedness and response, they mentioned how the community’s need for an online portal meshed with the City’s wish for local knowledge to inform climate adaptation planning. We saw an opportunity to work with residents and community partners to design a data portal that leverages lived experience and better climate disaster preparedness. And although coordinating the equitable codesign of a data portal stretched the bounds of our interdisciplinary knowledge and research approaches, we jumped at the chance to join Dove Springs residents, GAVA, and the City of Austin on this project.

To date, we’ve worked with our community partners to facilitate a group of neighborhood residents who are paid to help codesign the portal and to help later train other residents to use the portal to both share information useful for the City’s climate adaptation strategies and help their own households prepare for future floods and other socionatural disasters. This pilot program, dubbed the Climate Navigators, builds upon the robust community connections that exist in Dove Springs, in part because

FIG 2 Flooding in Dove Springs, Austin, Texas. Photo credit: City of Austin.

FIG 3 Neighborhood children create a community garden while their parents learn more about the Climate Navigator program. Photo credit: Go Austin! Vamos Austin!

1 Melissa Taboada, “Austin School Board Takes on Persistent

Segregation Problem,” Austin-American Statesman, October 21, 2016, https://www.statesman.com/news/20161021/austin-schoolboard-takes-on-persistent-segregation-problem/1.

2 Eric Tang & Bisola Falola, Those Who Left: Austin’s Declining

African American Population, (Austin: Institute for Urban Policy

Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin, 2016), https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/iupra/_files/pdf/those-who-leftaustin.pdf.

3 Displacement, gentrification, and infrastructure inequality in Austin have been documented by School of Architecture faculty in research such as Heather Way, Elizabeth Mueller, and

Jake Wegman, “Uprooted: Residential displacement in Austin’s gentrifying neighborhoods and what can be done about it,”

The University of Texas at Austin – Entrepreneurship and

Community Development Clinic – School of Law 3 (2018); Junfeng Jiao, “Measuring Vulnerable Population’s Healthy and Unhealthy Food Access in Austin, Texas,” AIMS public health 3, no. 4 (2016): 722.

4 Koch & Fowler, “A City Plan for Austin, Texas,” (1928).

5 City of Austin, “ City of Austin Sidewalk Plan Absent Sidewalk

Scoring Results November 2017,” https://austintexas.gov/sites/ default/files/files/Public_Works/Street_%26_Bridge/Absent_

Sidewalks_22x34_111517.pdf (2017); Karen Banks, “Central Texas

Foodshed Assessment.” Sustainable Food Center (2011).

6 Katherine Lieberknecht, Deidre Zoll, Junfeng Jiao, and

Katherine Castles, “Hurricane Harvey: Equal Opportunity Storm or Disparate Disaster?,” Local Environment 26, no. 2 (2021): 216–238. 7 Alejandra Maldonado, Timothy W. Collins, Sara E. Grineski, and Jayajit Chakraborty, “Exposure to Flood Hazards in Miami and Houston: Are Hispanic Immigrants at Greater Risk than

Other Social Groups?,” International Journal of Environmental

Research and Public Health 13, no. 8 (2016): 775–795. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijerph13080775; Bev Wilson and Arnab

Chakraborty, “Mapping Vulnerability to Extreme Heat Events:

Lessons from Metropolitan Chicago,” Journal of Environmental

Planning and Management 62, no. 6 (2019): 1065–1088. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2018.1462475.

8 Climate mitigation focuses on reducing, preventing, and stabilizing emissions of greenhouse gases, whereas climate adaptation refers to preparing for the impacts of the climate crisis already occurring, such as increased flooding and wildfire; Katherine Lieberknecht, Deidre Zoll, Junfeng Jiao, and

Katherine Castles, “Hurricane Harvey: Equal Opportunity Storm or Disparate Disaster?” Local Environment 26, no. 2 (2021): 216-238.

residents are accustomed to supporting each other when public infrastructure and services fail Fig 3. As residents help us improve and mature the Climate Navigator program, we hope to expand similar programs to other neighborhoods in Austin, since the need for this local knowledge and disaster preparedness extends past Dove Springs. As the Climate Navigator program has launched, we’ve worked to combine our team’s social science, planning, communications, engineering, and computer science skill sets as we’ve conducted interviews with residents, designed the back end of the portal, and begun work on the data systems needed to keep information safe. COVID-19 has slowed us down, but it has also given us space to work on some of the behind-the-scenes and trust-building portions of the project, which will strengthen eventual outcomes.

Our hope is that this local knowledge will be useful for residents and city departments and contribute to the large-scale modeling and strategy development being undertaken by the UT Austin Planet Texas 2050 research program. Planet Texas 2050 is a decade-long program focused on working with communities across Texas to discover knowledge and codesign strategies to prepare for climate risk while building a thriving, equitable future.15 Dozens of School of Architecture faculty, students, and staff are involved in Planet Texas 2050-related research projects, and the Dove Springs portal project may contribute data that helps improve outcomes in other projects. For example, I am integrating interview data from the Dove Springs project into a new research initiative led by Community and Regional Planning (CRP) professor Dr. Michael Oden and joined by CRP faculty Dr. Miriam Solis and myself. In this new project, we’re helping the City of Austin define equitable, well-paying, green sector jobs in order to increase sustainable economic development. By incorporating information from the Climate Navigators, we’re asking how green-job creation can reflect the lived experience and codesign skills held by residents in frontline communities, which adds significant value to effective climate planning. Could climate-related local knowledge and community-codesign become a new piece of Austin’s knowledge economy?

On my way to a meeting earlier this week, I crisscrossed my old school-bus transect that provided my first glimpse of Austin’s stark segregation. This transect now runs through a hotter Austin landscape, with flashier floods and more tenacious droughts. Seeing it reminded me of how much work remains before we’ve fully addressed infrastructure disparity, which is made even more critical by the climate crisis. Our allied disciplines have a once-in-a generation chance to work with communities to plan, design, and implement these equitable urban infrastructure systems. It will require hard work, new knowledge, expanded coalitions, political will, and good fortune, but the outcomes will be significant: resolving historic and ongoing inequity while preparing for new climate futures.

9 Manabendra Saharia, Pierre-Emmanuel Kirstetter, Humberto

Vergara, Jonathan J. Gourley, Yang Hong, and Marine Giroud,

“Mapping Flash Flood Severity in the United States,” Journal of

Hydrometeorology 18, no. 2 (2017): 397-411.

10 Katharine Hayhoe, Climate Change Projections for the City of Austin Draft Report, (Lubbock: ATMOS Research and

Consulting, 2014), https://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/

Sustainability/atmos_research.pdf.

11 Pierre Clavel, The Progressive City: Planning and Participation, 1969–1984 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986);

Judith E. Innes, “Information in Communicative Planning,”

Journal of the American Planning Association 64, no. 1 (1998): 52–63; Philip R. Berke and Mark R. Stevens, “Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation: Theory and Practice,” Journal of

Planning Education and Research 36, no. 3 (September 2016): 283–289. 12 Katherine Lieberknecht, Deidre Zoll, Junfeng Jiao, and

Katherine Castles, “Hurricane Harvey: Equal Opportunity Storm or Disparate Disaster?,” Local Environment 26, no. 2 (2021): 216–238.

13 Samuel D. Brody, David R. Godschalk, and Raymond J. Burby,

“Mandating Citizen Participation in Plan Making: Six Strategic

Planning Choices,” Journal of the American Planning

Association 69, no. 3 (2003): 245–264; Samuel D. Brody, Sammy

Zahran, Arnold Vedlitz, and Himanshu Grover, “Examining the Relationship Between Physical Vulnerability and Public

Perceptions of Global Climate Change in the United States,”

Environment and Behavior 40, no. 1 (2008): 72–95; Ellen

Bassett and Vivek Shandas, “Innovation and Climate Action

Planning: Perspectives from Municipal Plans,” Journal of the

American Planning Association 76, no. 4 (2010): 435–450, do i:10.1080/01944363.2010.509703; Jamie A.R. Haverkamp,

“Politics, Values, and Reflexivity: The Case of Adaptation to Climate Change in Hampton Roads, Virginia,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49, no. 11 (2017): 2673–2692, doi:10.1177/0308518X17707525.

14 Linda Shi, “From Progressive Cities to Resilient Cities: Lessons from History for New Debates in Equitable Adaptation to

Climate Change,” Urban Affairs Review, March 2, 2020, https:// urbanaffairsreview.com/2020/03/03/from-progressive-citiesto-resilient-cities-lessons-from-history-for-new-debates-inequitable-adaptation-to-climate-change/.

15 Planet Texas 2050: Annual Report 2020, Austin: The

University of Texas at Austin, 2021, https://www.flipsnack.com/

BridgingBarriers/planet-texas-2050-fy20-annual-report.html.