A community takes on extreme urban heat, starting with one block.
Series Number 1.4
Length: 8 mins
Languages: Subtitles available in English and Spanish. Press the CC button in the video player.
Chelsea, Massachusetts is hot. As the climate warms, the city is getting hotter.
In summer, Chelsea becomes an intense island of heat. Pavement, black roofs, lack of trees, traffic, and industry all create and hold heat. The high temperatures and humidity cause stress to the human body, inducing heat stroke and dehydration, and exacerbating medical issues such as diabetes, asthma, and COPD. This is especially bad in low income communities like Chelsea, where there is a struggle to pay for air conditioning at home and getting to work can mean waiting for public transportation on streets super-heated by cars and buses.
In an effort to combat the heat, researchers, city staff, landscape architects, engineers, community groups, and philanthropists came together to create the ambitious Cool Block project: Identify the hottest block in Chelsea and, using a bundle of already proven strategies, try to cool it down.
In this episode Hilary Dimino, a Senior Planner for the City of Chelsea, talks about why Chelsea is so hot, what they have learned from city residents, the team’s strategies for cooling, and why they work. Patricia Fabian and Madeleine Scammell, Principal Investigators at Boston University’s C-Heat Project, explain how they collect data to identify Chelsea’s hottest spots, the strategies for cooling, and how they will determine if they are working. Bianca Bowman of the community organization GreenRoots talks about how they work with the community residents to understand their needs and the plans for a new park.
“The Chelsea Cool Block film is a resource that I would love to show to our students. I love that it starts out by outlining the problem of heat intensity and lack of greenspace (a problem we are also experiencing in Fall River and New Bedford), but then highlights this beautiful story of community-based climate action. A significant part of our program is that students participate in community mapping to identify areas of need in their city, and then create a Climate Action Project that addresses a problem they feel passionate about. I think your film is a great example of how this can happen!
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