RCHI team member, Kian Goh, wrote an article titled “California’s Fires Prove the American Dream is Flammable” for The Nation. The author challenges the ideals of private ownership, urban design and traditional city planning in face of rampant Californian wildfires and global warming.

Kian argues that “few are discussing one key aspect of California’s crisis: Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive. The growth of urban regions in the second half of the 20th century has been dominated by economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property. Cities and towns have expanded in increasingly disperse fashion, fueled by cheap energy. Infrastructure has been built, deregulated, and privatized, extending services in more and more tenuous and fragile ways. ( . . . ) We need another kind of escape route—away from our ideologies of ownership and property, and toward more collective, healthy, and just cities.”

Read the full article here

About the author:

Prof. Kian Goh is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA. She completed her PhD in Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT DUSP in 2015, and served as Associate Director of RCHI for several years. Drawing on her dissertation, she authored Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press, 2021).  She is also co-editor of Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City (MIT Press, 2022).