Rich Bunnell


Heat Vulnerability GIS Map,
City of Flint, Michigan (2016)
For the final project in my Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class at Taubman College, I drew inspiration from Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, a pioneering work in environmental planning and climate justice. As part of his analysis Klinenberg used demographic data to map out the factors that caused some neighborhoods to experience greater mortality than others, such as race, age, and median household income level.
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I adapted the methods from the 2009 article “Mapping Community Determinants of Heat Vulnerability” by Colleen Reid et al. to produce a similar map for the city of Flint, Michigan. The Flint Water Crisis has already laid bare the city's deep environmental inequities, and with climate change likely to hit vulnerable residents first, methods like these are invaluable for climate planners.