The Climate-Ready Home: Thinking Through Landscapes of Vulnerability and Care in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

• In Event: Permeable Housing and Intersecting Infrastructures

Abstract

The Climate-Ready Home: Thinking Through Landscapes of Vulnerability and Care in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Like many late industrial cities, Philadelphia suffers from an affordable housing crisis related to aged housing stock, gentrification, and energy vulnerability -- among other dynamics. The costs of home heating and cooling, for example, have become unpredictable in recent years, with wild swings in seasonal temperatures. Micro-scale flooding and mold outbreaks pepper city neighborhoods, while policymakers allow pacs funded by developers to shape residential terrain. The affordable housing crisis is a legacy effect of neglected infrastructure, structural inequality, and unresponsive government. In Philadelphia, the home is seen as central node situated at the intersection of public-private infrastructures that include building stock, zoning laws, energy grids, lead pipes, and transportation among other socio-materialities. It is a city where policymakers, public health experts, community organizers, and others acknowledge that the home is a nexus of infrastructural vulnerability. Within this context, we focus on a project that experiments with the idea of the ‘climate-ready home’, a paradigm used in Australian and U.S. contexts in various ways -- sometimes used to sell energy efficiency technologies, in other cases as a vulnerability index in policy arenas, and in still other contexts, to prompt households think about emergency preparedness. In Philadelphia, the climate-ready home paradigm has been used in community-based workshop and municipal planning meetings to discuss how legacy infrastructure produces different kinds of vulnerabilities. The project is designed to ask how existing carescapes might be reinvigorated by climate change in ways that open up possibilities for housing justice.

Author

• Alison Kenner, Drexel University