Evaluate urban planning and green-building strategies for sustainability, explain the urban heat island effect, and describe environmental justice using a documented historical case.
Urban sustainability strategies include mixed-use zoning and public transit investment (reducing car-dependency and the emissions and land use that come with it), green building certification systems such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, which assesses a building's energy efficiency, water use, materials, and site selection), and urban green space -- parks, street trees, and green roofs -- which measurably reduces the urban heat island effect, the well-documented pattern of cities running warmer than surrounding rural areas because pavement and buildings absorb and re-radiate heat while lacking the evaporative cooling that vegetation provides.
Environmental justice describes a documented pattern, studied since at least the 1980s, that hazardous facilities (landfills, incinerators, industrial polluters, major highways) have historically been sited disproportionately near lower-income communities and communities of color, which then bear a disproportionate share of pollution exposure. The term traces partly to a well-documented 1982 protest against a PCB landfill sited in a majority-Black community in Warren County, North Carolina, and the resulting 1987 "Toxic Wastes and Race" study. This underlying siting-PATTERN is treated like any other environmental science evidence -- a documented historical and empirical finding -- while, consistent with this course's non-partisan approach to policy questions (Week 27), proposed remedies remain a genuine, open, multi-sided policy discussion.
Mastery looks like: They can explain the urban heat island mechanism with a correct connection to albedo, summarize the Warren County case accurately, and name concrete, fair-minded factors relevant to an environmental justice siting question without pre-judging the outcome.
Common stumbles: Treating the environmental justice siting data as itself a policy verdict rather than a documented pattern requiring a separate values discussion about remedies; assuming the urban heat island effect is just a subjective impression rather than a measurable physical phenomenon.