From the PI 

"Visioning a Cooler Tucson is a pilot project at the intersection of climate science, urban planning, and a participatory art-based process. Extreme heat is an increasingly recognized climate risk and planning for it has thus far primarily operated from the top-down, with experts deciding strategies without robust public participation. No matter how well-intended expert proposals may be, they can fall flat when thrust upon public that has felt sidelined by the process. Furthermore, a lack of public input constrains planning to implementation of “best practice,” and starves adaptation planning of efficient alternatives that may be desired by communities. Participatory art-based planning (Lee et al. 2015) is an emerging approach that shows promise for addressing such issues. We propose a pilot deliberative poll (Fishkin 2018), using rigorous art-based participation, climate science, and rapid-prototype visualizers to help a randomly selected “mini-public” (Smith 2009) understand the causes and impacts of extreme heat, and then make proposals on desired strategies to increase extreme heat resilience in the built environment.

Our pilot project has three objectives:

-Synthesizing preliminary findings from the workshop about desired trade-offs and forms of extreme heat adaptation into a peer-reviewed paper.

-Evaluating the novel use of the participatory method to better understand the efficacy of participatory and art-based strategies for climate adaptation, published as a peer-reviewed paper (e.g., Carman et al. 2015).

-Pursuing additional funding using the visual and workshop materials to scale up this pilot project establishing a series of similar deliberative polls throughout the Southwest. The expanded project will enable us to test geographic variability for desired forms of adaptation to extreme heat and other climate risks and will enable us to further refine the participatory process. This expanded project will be an incredibly powerful intervention in the ongoing process of planning for climate change."