Text

theses

ETD doctoral

As elevated summer temperatures increase in frequency and duration, they pose threats to human health and well-being that differentially affect the most vulnerable urban residents, including older adults in low-resource communities. The percentage of the senior population living in cities is projected to increase in the US and a high proportion are likely to live in poor housing conditions, which makes them more susceptible to environmental challenges. In the 1995 Chicago heat wave, it was found that most of the heat victims were low-income older adults living in highly urbanized neighborhoods, with no access to air-conditioning. More recently, during Hurricane Irma, several heat-related deaths in Florida were attributed to power outages that exacerbated an existing medical condition by depriving residents of cooling. Such cases highlight the strong institutional dimensions of heat adaptation at socially vulnerable sites and emphasize the need to provide integrated solutions across spatial scales.
This research is about the real experiences and exposures of seniors living in a low-income urban area in NJ, US during heat waves. The focus is on thermal and air quality conditions in multi-family public housing, and the availability of mitigating affordances. It employs a social-ecological systems framework that conceptualizes urban sites as complex interacting social, natural and built environments, in order to document and describe the relative roles of building systems, microclimate, social context and individual agency in heat adaptation.
The social-ecological systems approach is found to be helpful as a descriptive and diagnostic tool to guide study design, data collection and modeling, but also as a means to identify cost-effective, integrated heat adaptation strategies at nested scales. In particular, it is demonstrated that although indoor environments are critical in protecting seniors from heat, there is value in investing in outdoor environments, which can function as alternative shelters during heat wave periods. Furthermore, it is shown that heat adaptation is not only subject to built-environment characteristics indoors and outdoors, but also depends on how people interact with these resources and the extent to which they receive support from social networks and community organizations.
Eventually, this research leads to the realization that heat adaptation pathways are found at the very localized scales and inevitably include indoor-outdoor synergies, tied to individual users, local actors and institutions. It concludes with a list of concrete recommendations, through a set of behavioral and physical alterations for transforming built environments in order to improve the thermal experiences of low-income seniors.

ETD_11332

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-y6n4-m967

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