Tucson Grown
Research by heat expert and College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture Professor Ladd Keith is shaping climate solutions worldwide.
Picture of Ladd Keith, director of the Heat Resilience Initiative and associate professor at U of A’s School of Landscape Architecture and Planning and Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy.
Chris Richards / The University of Arizona Alumni
Ladd Keith ’03 ’05 ’19 grew up just miles from the University of Arizona campus in a neighborhood near Davis-Monthan Air Force Base called Terra del Sol — Latin for “land of the sun.” He spent his summers doing what most Tucson kids of his generation did during the summer: Holing up inside to play hours of video games like SimCity — a game that lets players design their own modern metropolises.
But Keith, now an associate professor in the U of A’s School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, may have become an extreme heat expert despite growing up in Tucson — not because of it. “I never really thought about the heat in the summer, because when you grow up in a place like this, the heat just becomes all you know,” he says.
Keith was in Japan right after his undergraduate program, on his first trip outside the U.S., when he began to understand what urban planning was. As he explored dense metro areas like Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, he couldn’t help but notice how much more walkable they were than his hometown. It was his first practical understanding of the field, and it inspired him to apply to the U of A’s urban planning master’s program a week after returning home.
“When I was on that trip, all of it collided — SimCity, Japan, Tucson — and I thought, ‘This would be a really cool direction to go in,’” Keith says.
Now, Keith is one of the country’s foremost experts on planning for extreme heat, the No. 1 weather-related cause of death in the U.S. Alongside his faculty appointment, he also is the director of the Heat Resilience Initiative in the university’s Arizona Institute for Resilience, and has led federal grants that help cities improve their response to extreme heat.
Before his epiphany in Japan, Keith attended the U of A College of Fine Arts on a writing scholarship and earned a bachelor’s degree in media arts. Still enamored with storytelling but unsure of his next move, he took the trip to Japan — and found his calling. After his master’s program, he was well on his way toward a planning career when Hurricane Katrina devastated cities like New Orleans. He was not near the disaster, but headlines about it helped sharpen his focus as a planner.
“I was just struck by the fact that, not only could we design our cities better, but some of them are very poorly designed for low-income folks and marginalized people,” Keith says. “I realized, not only do we need to plan our cities better, but we have to consider weather and climate change, too.”
As a master’s student, Keith got hands-on experience helping plan towns in Arizona, including Oro Valley and the unincorporated Arizona City in Pinal County. He later was appointed to the City of Tucson's planning commission, for which he served as chair and led the process for a new general plan in 2013.
Around that same time, Keith began his doctorate in the U of A Graduate Interdisciplinary Program for Arid Lands Resource Sciences, one of the first and only programs of its kind focused on desert climates. Keith’s focus was on understanding how cities across the Southwest were addressing climate change through urban planning. To his surprise, he says, climate change factored very little into the general plans for many Arizona cities that were growing hotter by the year.
Even fewer plans back then were considering heat the same way that plans would account for other natural disasters. Many other types of disasters have long been met with interdisciplinary solutions, Keith says — the federal government has tracked droughts, for example, since the Dust Bowl.
“Heat requires the same transdisciplinary approach, but it’s only recently been recognized as a serious hazard, so we didn’t know until a few years ago what connections needed to be made to address it,” he says.
As a social scientist, Keith often sees himself as the connective tissue for teams of climate scientists, public health professionals, fellow planners and other experts. And as a storyteller at heart, his goal with any project is to turn findings into practical results for as many people as possible.
“The storytelling and the results of my research are probably my favorite part of it,” he says.