Welcome to the Architecture for Hell Friday Lecture series.

I'm Ray Pentecost.

Welcome.

We've got a great panel for you today.

A little something different.

We've got four people talking about the subject and I'll introduce them now, one by one, I'm going to read this because the credentials are remarkable and I don't want to miss a thing.

Doctor Shannon Lee Shannon is a professor of landscape architecture and urban planning and executive associate dean for the School of Architecture at Texas A&M University.

She also serves as the founder and director of research design research for Active Living here at TAMU, where she and her interdisciplinary team conduct research that links the built environment with various public health outcomes.

Her expertise is in active living research.

Current research has several strategic directions, including active aging, climate change, adaptation, health equity through modifiable environmental solutions.

Dr. Lee And we also have Dr. Galen Newman.

Galen is professor and head in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and the Nicole and Kevin Youngblood, professor of residential land development at Texas A&M at TAMU.

He teaches undergraduate and graduate landscape architecture and planning studios, landscape architecture, history courses and advanced visualization courses.

His research interests include urban regeneration, land use, science, spatial analytics, community resilience, community urban scale design.

His current research focuses on the integration of urban regeneration and urban flood resilience.

Dr. Dongsheng Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at TAMU.

Her research focuses on environmental health, nature, mental health, nature and child development, environmental health, equity and urban informatics.

And Dr.

Sung mainly is an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning here at TAMU.

His primary research focus Resolve revolves around the profound impact of environmental factors on health and safety, with a particular emphasis on creating healthy and safe environ ments in marginalized communities.

He is actively engaged in teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses, including digital communication, Urban Design Theory, Landscape Architecture Studio.

His instructional approach addresses urgent urban and societal challenges such as safety, environmental justice and health disparities.

Would you join me in welcoming our panel to the studio?

Thank you for the introduction.

So we are a panel of four from all from Landscape architecture program.

From the Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning Department.

I got to serve as a moderator, moderator as well as a panelist.

But I'm going to stick to the first of all a little bit more closely.

So in my first kind of opening up of this panel, I just tried to put the keywords out there, health in all design, whether it's a small scale building with a windows or other elements looking out into the greenery or the landscape that might have an impact on how you perceive or feel.

Relax from your daily hassle or stress to the larger neighborhood level scales, like a built environment around you and your neighborhood.

For example, streets like this could potentially be less accommodating or healthy compared to streets that might be more complete with people friendly infrastructure, green infrastructure, those amenities that can make people be more attracted to using streets for various daily activities and social engagement.

Realizing the roles of the built environment, how that is a part of health infrastructure, there has been a call to action by US Surgeon General that the National doctors putting issues like creating walkable communities as a top agenda to really tackle, to promote the health of Americans and professional disciplines across the fields from public health, landscape, architecture, planning, architecture all came together to also join this call to action to really start creating healthier communities.

Or envision call from Surgeon General Calling 2023 also emphasizes the importance of social interactions and how the serious risk factors are associated with loneliness and isolations.

That has been aggravated through as we went through COVID.

Thinking about the questions, as you listen to this panel series, can our environment make us sick?

Kill us?

And the last one is something that I want to make a pitch with my few minutes here in this panel are aging in place.

I always tell my colleagues that along with climate change, population aging is another grand challenges that we face and we're going to continue to face in the future in our discipline as a society in large.

So we know the world is aging and we all are aging in the United States at a pace that much faster than some other countries.

In the recent discussions around aging in place, we all know that there is a demand and the desire for older adults to stay in their own community for as long as possible.

And that is oftentimes difficult due to the variation of environment indoor into housing design in the neighborhood, in mobility and transportation infrastructure and especially with the declining physical and mental conditions, those barriers become really very difficult to overcome If you don't live in an environment that has barrier free and supportive attributes.

So we're in a discipline where we can help create environments to become more age friendly, therefore becomes friendly to everybody across all ages and abilities that can also help contribute to addressing all the challenges that we're facing with population aging from ranging from creating something that's accommodating people with physical and cognitive decline, but also all the way to the right hand here, looking at intergenerational communities where we really deal with really activated and socially engaged in communities to really deal with larger social cultural norms of really embracing population aging and engaging intergenerational interactions.

And some of the concepts out there by Oldenburg are places where people can gather together, bring people across ages and abilities.

And those are the kind of places that we design park for speech are also important third places as well, and also other recreational and public destinations.

So one of my colleagues who are not here, who is not here today, Dr. Zoe, he she's an assistant professor in the department too, with her dissertation, we kind of look back how in urban design theory, we kind of conceptualize a neighborhood around the school in the twenties with the neighborhood unit theory.

And then in the nineties, when we talk about new urbanism with the density gradient and promoting compact developments, perhaps now we can think about the new concepts of neighborhood units that are centered around nature based destinations that it's known to be most effective in bringing people across ages and abilities.

Those will become a new anchor to develop the neighborhoods.

And then we think about ways to really support and engage communities in a smaller urban fabric and this is an example of the kind of conceptual work that we have been working on.

People can review it later, but if I hand it over to Dr. Lee, I want to recap that we are really in the discipline where we can contribute to promoting health in all design, of course scales, but also the concept of health range older from protecting and creating an environment that's safe that Dr. Lee will be talking about to places that are health promoting, like the work that I've been doing, promoting urban, walkable communities and healthy age friendly communities, and then restoring health that Dr. Dong Ying Lee would be talking about.

And is she actually her expertise?

And she talks more about the literature review today.

So that will all contribute to promoting health across the full range of, I think, health.

So I'll hand it over to Dr. Lee short.

So thank you so much to you from being me.

And my overall research topic is to explore the impact of those environmental factors on health and safety.

And today I want all to be specifically want to talk about more significance of urban trees on neighbor food, the safety.

So as you can see, urban trees can be seen everywhere, all in your backyard and your neighborhood and on the streets while you are on the way and back to your campus and school and home.

And those are urban trees can bring many benefits environmental, the social, the inheritors.

And I explored or how or one trees can bring the benefits to more decrease the outdoor folding and reduce the small and also promote the resilience of COVID 19.

But today I want to talk more about the safety issue.

So as a mechanisms, the urban trees can help build collective efficacy by bringing and promoting more kinds of gathering places and also socially and physically, you can bring more kinds of the physical appearance of a place and psychologically it can reduce the stress throughout the stress reduction theory.

So my research questions are.

So first, to what extent to the urban trees or promoted or perceived the safety and help reduce the outdoor crime and I also wanted to see some synergistic or offsetting effect.

And secondly, there are multiple ways to make sure those or one trees.

So I want you to to see among the different major amounts of the urban trees what factors bring more benefits.

And finally, those kinds of actual crime and feeling safe is different.

So that I also wanted to see what type of door or urban trees can bring more kinds of perceive the safety and how neighbor food, the cleaning needs, maintenance and quality could matter.

So the first study is more about the geospatial analysis to see the moderating effect of the urban trees on the relationship between walkable environment and safety.

So a walkable environment is known to promote natural surveillance according to change.

JACOBS You can help to reduce the crime, but at the same time it can also will over the environment that could bring more strangers and probably the needs and uncertainties or potentially can increase the more crime.

So what I want you to to see is that how tree canopy and trees can help to reduce those crime issues, as well as the moderating factor between those a walkable environment and crime.

So walkable environments could bring more kinds of the crime at all.

Our data say about the areas with more walkable areas would be the more urban stations can have a benefits by offsetting those kinds of negative impacts of walkability in reducing the crime.

So the second study I wanted to see the different the major amount of what urban trees so that are utilized.

One is no satellite images that the tree canopy coverage is.

And second one is the Google Street View image is captured throughout all or those three segment.

And the third one is, though probably all database of the tree.

So that that includes more tree data like comb or size of the trees and pieces as pieces of the trees as well.

So what we found is they consistently those three different characteristics of the urban trees are associated with or reduce those tree crime.

And then I also checked those different size so they'll Erdos be the more kinds of the or large size tree density are associated with the reduce the crime while small size or tree canopies are more associated with the increase of property crime.

That's because of the more plucking those kinds of the old criminal behavior with those small kinds of trees.

So it is more important to consider the size and appropriate three kinds of though obstructive level to consider or to plant or trees as well as promoted those safety.

So also three, those major amounts of trees can be used the complementary to better understand and or so many is to see the forest as what is to reduction of the crime.

And third one is we also need to see though perceive the safety.

So I utilize the data of the Austin Community survey.

So given that warm, we also found those areas with thought all areas would be the more kinds of well-maintained and quality areas.

Read more tree canopy or can help to reduce the crime and increase those perceived the safety as well.

That's what we found.

And we also utilize the in running techniques to understand which level of the tree canopy would be more beneficial.

So that's one we wanted to explore and it's all kind of the take home message.

What we did is all incorporating crime prevention throughout environmental design into more greenery.

Greening practices are important to reduce those kinds of actual crime as what is a promoting the safety issues.

So these are something that we are considering as so future studies.

But yeah, I'm glad to share my piece of the studies and I want to toss it to Tony Lee.

All right.

Thank you so much, Ray and Shannon, for the opportunity to discuss our research here today.

So my research projects are grounded in the field of environmental psychology.

And recently I've been looking more at climate change and how climate factors, along with environmental factors, influence people's mental health and other health outcomes separately.

So this project is about climate factors and mental health.

We did a systematic review and meta analysis, which is a method that allows us to collect literature from all different fields that investigate the relationship between climate factors and mental health outcomes.

So we know that climate change is a big issue, societal issue right now and extreme weather conditions caused by caused by climate change are getting more intense and frequent.

And then those linked to different increases in the ambient temperature, radiation and other environmental conditions.

And then for humans, the increase in temperature and radiation also affect our human body heat flux in the environment.

And those conditions have been shown to be strongly associated with mental diseases and negative emotions and other conditions.

So we identified some gaps in previous research, one of them being the overemphasis on air temperature or land surface temperature.

When we think about human like mental health issues or the environment, the human actually experience in everyday life, we see different types of heat flux.

So those are related to environmental factors such as air temperature, wind, humidity, which influence our evaporative heat loss, radioactive heat loss, convective heat loss.

So it's not just the air temperature that matters to us.

And then a lot of studies focus on like heat and temperature conditions.

But then we also know that the humidity, radiation, wind, those are related to our sleep quality, our eating disorder, eating habits and many other behavioral and mental health outcomes.

So in this research, we wanted to assess how different types of environmental exposure like climate exposure variables might be associated with the overall mental and behavioral health outcome.

And then also how different types of mental disorders might be associated with climate factors.

And then we wanted to also identify the knowledge and methodological gaps.

So this literature review, we want it to collect as many rough reference articles as possible.

So we did databases that cover psychology, public health, environment, and then we only included peer, peer reviewed journal articles in English from the start of any of the databases until 2022.

So there is a preferred reporting guideline for systematic reviews, which we followed in the process of doing this to make sure that this process is rigorous and can be repeated.

So we collected a total of 78 articles after reviewing the title Abstract and the full text for inclusion and exclusion criteria here.

And then the meta analysis is a statistical method that allows us to pull the effect sizes from each individual article and in a way utilize the amount of data from all those articles and gather from statistical modeling to the effect size that's pooled from all those different studies.

So it will overcome some of the issues of small sample sizes of individual studies.

We were only able to do medal analysis out of 42 of those studies because some of them didn't report statistics that were comparable.

So we collected data about information of those studies, who the participants were, the climate exposures that were measured, the mental health outcomes measured, as well as the statistical analysis.

And then we assessed the quality or risk of bias of each of these studies and also the strengths of the evidence of each category of effect size that we obtained.

So in terms of the results, we found out that studies were conducted in a lot of different areas by the counting, the number in each area.

We found Asia, Europe and North America or overrepresented in the global south.

Most areas in the global South were not represented well.

And then climate zone wise, we have more temperate and dry climates than tropical and polar climates.

And then the top five measured climate or meteorological factors were air temperature, humidity, precipitous ocean solar radiation and air pressure.

And then the top five measured mental health outcomes were schizophrenia disorders, dementia, anxiety and psychoactive substance use.

So we looked at so these are the effect sizes that we pulled from the different studies.

If you see this like there's a small diamond that is on the right side of the slide, that means there is a positive relationship.

So we found out that the number of heatwave days was positive flow related to increased mental and behavioral disorder risk.

Same with temperature that goes beyond the 99th percentile of local threshold.

And similarly, we found out that some account for index that takes into account both air temperature, humidity and wind.

If the summer index goes up beyond a certain threshold, there's also increased risk of mental and behavioral disorders among all of the different types of disorders.

We found that schizophrenia was significantly related, whereas the other types we didn't have enough evidence to have a definite answer.

So we identified some gaps in the research, especially related to the spatial and temporal mismatch between the climate factors measured and the mental health conditions of the population and individuals within those studies.

And then we talked about discussed the statistical approaches and what the future matter analysis could build on.

What we found out here.

So that's pretty much it.

I'll pass it to Dr. Newman.

All right.

Thank you.

It's fantastic.

So I'm going to talk to you guys a little bit different topic, I think.

Same topic with a different approach, more of integrating science into a design process to get some publishable material out of it.

So this is a project we did in Galena Park.

We call it the Adaptive Storm Box, because as you'll see, as I go through this, we had to create a plan that a master plan for them that would allow them to choose from a set of of options based on the conditions that they were dealing with on a certain parcel of land.

It'll make more sense as we go through it.

But you can see where the Galena Park, Texas is.

If you if you don't know where it is, it's kind of on the eastern side of Houston.

It's tangential to the Houston boundary.

It's about the size of a Houston super neighborhood.

But it it's its own city.

So the city of Galena part, we didn't design the entire city.

We have a kind of a sub site, but everything pink, you see on here is an industrial complex, right?

So what's happening here is that they're getting there in there in the 100 year flood plain.

They're in the storm surge floodplain.

And then as this area floods, Right.

All these industries are washing all these chemicals into the community and all the air pollution coming out of these petrochem plants is is causing adverse risk, health risk to the communities, as you'll see.

So if you look at some of the the flood events, some of the main flood events, sorry, it looks like my aspect ratio messed up a bit on the transfer here.

But Hurricane Ike, right.

We are all fairly familiar with that.

And Hurricane Harvey from 2017, if you look at this, this right side over here in Galena Park, the area of the area that was inundated during those storm.

So 9.2% of the community was inundated during Ike and 17.3% during Hurricane Harvey.

So rainfall, extreme rainfall events, storm surge events.

But we also see the industrial area during Harvey about almost 60 acres of industries were underwater for a few days.

And the same thing during Ike actually even more because most of those most of those industries are actually within the hundred year flood plain.

So it's overtopping straight into it.

So 70 almost 70 acres of of the industrial area where we're inundated.

So if you look at the storm surge floodplain, these maps up top, these are different categories of hurricanes and the storm surge resultant from those hurricanes.

Again, everything in pink is an industry and everything that you see, that's a dot there, that's a toxic release inventory building or a TCE.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality recognized.

So they're all basically contamination sources.

All right.

And then the blue is the storm surge floodplain from each of those from each of those different categories of hurricanes.

But when you get to a Category three in particular, right, you see 90% of the industries are inundated.

Category four, hurricane, 71, Category five, 83% of the industries.

Right.

So it's a significant amount of flooding that's washing into the community from these industrial petrochemical complexes and stuff.

Then if you look, you think about it with with climate change.

So if you have you know, if you have a four foot, four foot sea level rise in the next hundred years.

Right.

That means estimating wise, the hundred year flood plains is going to move up four feet on the on the elevation.

Right.

So you're going to have the flood plains going to expand.

And and so as the flood plain expands, that means more people are going to not only have to buy flood insurance, but they're all going to be they're all going to be at higher risk for this kind of contamination transfer, doing things during these flood events with sea level rise.

So on the left side here at the top is a lot of kind of metals.

And then the the bottom is all the I don't really speak chemical that well, but I work with a lot of public health folks that do.

But we've got a lot of this data out of the the toxic release inventory data set and we linked it to kind of what it's what what the exposure to these chemicals does to the human body.

So basically, the bigger the organ that's more adversely affected.

So you can see the lungs, the heart, the brain, the kidney, all the exposure to all of those chemicals.

Okay.

So if you're living in this neighborhood, right, you're getting impacts on your organs constantly just by breathing the air or just interacting in the environment.

And if you look at some of the CDC data on the community itself, just compared to the rest of Harris County, it's in Harris County, city of Galena Park, it's in the top five.

And all of these diseases listed here from heart disease to asthma.

Right.

So your air pollution is obviously linked to asthma, but obviously things like obesity, physical health and mental health, all of those things they're they're getting impacted on.

And I think exposure to a lot of this pollution and contamination obviously is is a big part of that.

So we did some some mapping.

I won't get into the details on this too much, but we did some some overlays to figure out which areas where we're actually looking to target buyout sites.

But basically it identified which sites were most vulnerable to contamination and flooding simultaneously.

The work with the city did a lot of community engagement.

We came up with this kind of boundary here, the South side, which makes sense is which is much, much more high risk.

And this was from a few engagement sessions with the community.

This was the master plan.

The very built out is very built up community already or city already.

And so most of the development occurred kind of on the southern area and we put a significant amount of green infrastructure in here to help kind of to remediate a lot of the water, sequester it the flood waters and then obviously clean, clean the air pollution.

So one of the things that we had going on here, there's so many industries around this community.

They have they have thousands and thousands of gas pipes and electric.

There are all these different pipes underground.

They don't even know what's what's that what's going in them.

And they're leak a lot, too.

But so we had to set up they were they wanted to try to use the rights of ways to to connect all this stuff.

And we went out and hand measured all the rights away.

Some of them were five foot wide, some of them were 45 foot wide.

It's very mixed match.

But basically we set up this set of green infrastructure you could put in based on whether the pipe with the pipe depth, because they didn't have enough data on where the pipes were either and then how wide the how wide the right of way was.

So you could do small things like, you know, very shallow rain gardens or even vegetated was in, you know, very thin, right.

Of ways.

And where where the pipes aren't that deep.

But as you get deeper right, and the light gets bigger, you can do larger things.

Detention, retention, bonds on the right bottom, right over here.

So that's the way this thing was set up.

And so we we did some more science to project the impact of what we were doing of the master plan we created.

This is called the long term hydrologic impact assessment model You built in land use data and those types of things, other input variables.

And basically with the 30% increase in green infrastructure that we put in, we reduce we reduce runoff by 14% per year and in at least the pollutants by 30% per year.

And that's just in kind of metals.

And then a couple of bacterial fecal coliform, bigger strep.

You can see the hopefully you can see the the metals that we have here.

But the idea was, okay, we said, let's show them how to do this, link this stuff.

So we pick a condition and we had the what we call it Assemblage Unit.

So we had a number by each of these these, these green infrastructure facilities.

So I'll talk you through one of them.

In other words, you know, you could have 22, 13 and 17, and this is how they would link together in a certain area.

So this is right down the Holland Avenue, which is the main street here.

And actually this community won $3 million omnibus grant from this work to help put put start putting this stuff in on the streets in the Clifton Street as well.

But but this was kind of just an example.

We showed them like, hey, there you have this kind of riparian area in between the development and where the bayou is and how it can link to some of these.

The the water comes off the road into the curb, cut into this kind of bio.

Well, and it moves through these tree box filters and then all basically it gets cleaned as it makes its way down toward the bayou.

One of the other things we did here was we took the green infrastructure set.

And again, for brevity, I won't get into the the modeling, but it's called Delph.

Delph three D mesh.

And it takes you can take previous storms, right?

So you can take Hurricane Ike or Hurricane Harvey and run, run, run a model of that storm and then change the environment and then rerun the model of that storm.

So they re we reran Hurricane Ike, which was the storm surge event and the master plan at least according to the Delph model, the peak inundated inundation was reduced by 30% of storm water and also 38 hours of flooding from was reduced to 10 hours of flooding right from Hurricane Ike.

So took off about 28 hours worth of soft stuff, the community being underwater.

So it's pretty amazing, I think.

And that's my that's my spiel.

I will pass the torch back to you and maybe now.

Thank you so much.

So we heard four different stories, I guess short stories.

Well, maybe the audience collect the thoughts for questions.

I got a ask the panelists to comment on your work and how it relates to climate change.

I presented right the continuum of protecting, promoting and restoring health, even at the very fundamental level of protecting health.

We are living in an environment that really harms us from exposure to toxins and heat and safety issues.

It's really concerning, right?

But I can see a lot of those have significant implications and it's going to get worse with the climate change.

So can you briefly comment on your thoughts related to your topic and how the potential implications of of your work is in the face of climate change?

I guess she wants me to go there.

Sure.

I think I hit it.

I touched on a little bit of that here.

Right.

But obviously the conditions are worsening.

It's not just if you you know, it's not just the water levels rising, but the frequency of storm events.

Right.

Or even any kind of disaster event and the magnitude of them is getting stronger.

I think over time as well, at least from the data that I've seen, you know, especially in Texas, when you get an average hurricane every five years, it actually, you know, just a regular hurricane that hits the it hits off the coast onto the mainland.

But, you know, we're getting it used to be we get a big, you know, hurricane like Ike or something.

And Harvey, you know, every 15 years.

But in the last 20, 30 years, they've become become more and more rapid.

Right.

So to me know, as as these things change, the risk changes in the community, the amount of risk.

So it's it's amplified in different cities and communities.

More people are at risk.

More people are going to be adversely impacted by these by these events as the climate changes.

So it's probably more important to do these things and be more proactive in the way that not only where we even plan to put new development, right, we need to be smarter about where we place the development, but then also how we how we build the environment, how we build the environment around that development so that it's protected as well.

I guess that that would be that would be my major statement on it, you know?

Great.

Doctor.

so yeah, from our research, we're really looking at climate change and how the environment is playing a role, whether it is a worsening the impact of the climate change on people or whether it's moderating or providing relief for the heat conditions or we also look at the winter, you know, not only extreme weather condition doesn't always mean like a hot summer days, but might be colder winter days as we experience a couple of years before.

So we look at the synergistic effects of the environment along with the these, you know, the extreme weather events and see, you know, what the interactions are.

And then also because those climate change impacts always have disproportionate impact on, you know, marginalized communities and communities where you have minority residents.

So we're really focused on, you know, under-resourced or underrepresented communities in our research.

In addition to the the link, the link between like heat related issues and various mental health problems, there are also direct mental health issues like echoing diety, right.

That people are experiencing that would be direct and indirect linkage.

But the direct causal role of the climate change on mental and maybe other aspects of health.

Yeah, and we think of the environment, for example, trees as having direct influence on the cooling, the air temperature and providing shade.

But it also has indirect impacts on mental health through stress recovery and other pathways as well.

I don't think so.

Yeah.

For me, mine is the only one that I didn't talk to about the climate change issue in my slides, but that's one of my future and current kinds of study as well.

So climate change is also driver of the escalated of violence and crime.

So there is evidence that climate change with the excessive heat increase, those kinds of oppressiveness and even stress to increase more crime issues so that I and more importantly, climate change exacerbate more crime against minority and also woman children and even low income population.

And so that I think those of approach to to reduce such kinds of the crime throughout though more innovative solutions including more could in infrastructure and it's also more available for everyone so that we need to think about how publicly we can approach to to reduce those kinds of crime and increase the safety throughout the green infrastructure.

And we also need to find more evidence, like all what we tested in certain studies.

And we also need to like what do we need to do?

We needed we needed to collect more evidence.

And also we do more kinds of comprehensively collecting those kinds of information.

And as Dr. Gilden Newman demonstrated, we need more kinds of the innovative and evidence based design, and that's more targeted to more solutions in local communities.

So that's what we kinds of the work together.

And so that's the design matters and research matters and what we are doing right now.

And another keywords that kind of comes up to my mind is the nature based solution and seems to be able to address a lot of issues.

So we talked about both directly and indirectly, and we are in a discipline that really specializes in dealing with nature based solutions, whether it's green infrastructure or other amenities and various aspects of urban and, you know, other types of nature or blue nature or greenery.

So that also is something that I think we have a role in doing a better job in incorporate those into vulnerable communities and settings.

So we have about 6 minutes if we have any questions from the audience.

Question Yeah, So actually many of us, such as in Texas, are now already faced with, so I would say traveling with the digital infrastructure contact points that sounded to me like the gap, the opportunity relating to research pathways is extremely challenging or we are still like say, research, not advocating to practice, but I think so you talked about, yeah, we're living in a very auto dependent society that has also linked to today's theme of climate change, right?

The emission and all that is a major contributor to climate change.

And we also live in of a state that's large and very auto dominant.

And sometimes it's not possible to to walk or use other more other mobility environmentally cleaner and healthier options and walking biking can be not safe or not even viable.

Things are too far apart, right?

So that will probably change.

So yeah, it would take time, I guess.

But the evidence that we are building of sort of research will help educate policymakers and the general public when we when we make investment decisions, right, we fully acknowledge the values of sidewalk or trees and those are not just extra amenity.

That is a core part of know infrastructure that we all need because of these benefits related to climate change or health and, you know, active transportation.

But we don't have a full understanding or data to quantify such a benefit, to make a strong case that would justify or further encourage by proper policy priorities or funding allocation.

So yeah, I think in a way it's an excellent point and that's another part of climate change discussions, right?

Nature based solutions and maybe active transportation.

Those have overlaps too.

Right.

And the kind of research that we all are doing are touching upon that issue.

Any other comments you want to.

Yeah, I mean, I think in Texas and in particular, it's the we have to do a better job of educating landowners and being advocates for making a lot of advocates for climate change and dealing with it.

But but also making this type of stuff digestible to the layperson so they can it because I say that in the sense that, you know, no, no state like Texas allows people to do with their land what they want as much as Texas does.

Right.

I mean, these other states with 15 minute cities.

Right.

And those types of things, they're they're they're trying to grow closer together.

So you don't need all that stuff.

But Texas is a different there's a I don't know if I would say the word free or state or whatever, but it's you know, it's a different mindset and there's pros and cons on both sides of that, you know, So I'm not going to get into, you know, a debate on whether it's good or bad.

But I think educating people that own the land so they can make the best decisions not only for them quality of life wise and economic wise, but also for, you know, their neighbors.

Right.

What can I do to help to help lower our risks collectively?

I think educating the population about these things and hopefully having people buy into that and knowing better, knowing how to make better choices with the way they they develop or or whatever they do with their land in Texas is a is is definitely necessary.

Yes.

George.

Well, first, thank you for a wonderful presentation.

If I were maybe a few years younger, I'd come and take BHP in landscape in an environment where the climate things are so important because we're getting sidetracked on unfortunate things like running wars and all kinds of other related issues.

It's interesting that Texas is in a position both by the tax law.

People are now leaving California and some of the other states coming to Texas.

So when I was in school in New York State was number one.

I think California may have been number two and Texas was 93.

And now New York is three and California is one and Texas is two.

And that's going to continue.

So there's a big dimension of going outside the building, details into the total environment.

To cut to the chase, my question is in Texas, at what temperature is life for people impossible to sustain?

We are looking at a boiling point.

Yes.

Let's see if I could open up dimensions for consulting to companies that want to come in here and really don't understand employment.

Well, I mean, but you.

Right.

So where we live and south of us, we have a much we are one 115.

We can we can hit that it's still live.

But you know, northern Texas is is still gets pretty hot, but it's not getting as hot as we get.

I mean, it's a big state with a lot of land, which fits back into your question, right?

That's why we're so spread out.

So I don't know.

I mean, it also would be it would also vary on the age group.

You know, I think mid twenties, the thirties, they can handle much hotter than probably a senior population.

So modeling technology where you can model like heat stress, right?

So not only to ambient temperature, right, other factors are considered and there could be a threshold.

I guess there.

Well, also, how long are you out in it?

Right.

I mean, that's a big factor.

When I was growing up, we had an extraordinary to was not involved in climate.

But studying climate and in fact Santa Barbara to China because of climate.

So it could be that there are parts of Texas, perhaps in the whole country that are less susceptible to these extremes, which may have affect siting for new communities, new cities with this population coming in.

So I think you're really on some very valuable probes, but maybe you take it even to the next step where people would come to you and say, tell us where we're where do we need to go?

And as we escape taxes from California and New York, that's good point.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for the comment.

Before we wrap up, I asked each panelist to kind of share the take away message.

You said, you know, we need to tell our story better for the lay audience.

And with something practical, actionable wisdom, can each of you try to to do that?

Sure.

Do you want me to say what you just said?

Take away message from from your.

Yeah.

I mean, I think my my take away message is that we, you know, we all have to work together collectively to make things better, not only now, but but in the future.

I mean, there's a lot of at risk and high, highly vulnerable areas and mostly marginal allies, communities that I work with what we call fenceline communities.

They really need a lot of help and and a lot of the stuff that we're doing with them, they're going after they're using a lot of the science that we show.

The plans don't even get used that much for going after grants, but with these communities, but a lot of the science, we work with them together to get, it's really doing a big deal to help improve their conditions so they can deal with a lot of these adverse things that that they're that a lot of us aren't subject to.

And I would just say that it's very eye opening in a lot of these communities to just go and see what kind of problem that they're dealing with.

It will certainly shock you in some cases.

So that's I guess that's maybe not the the happiest kind of a gloomy take away, but, you know, help.

Let's all work together to help one another deal with the current situations and the harsh ones coming up with climate change.

All right, Dr. Lee.

I just want to say architecture and landscape architecture, those are disciplines that are well connected with the ground, with the land, You know, no matter how high, how tall the building we built, we still consider the soil conditions, the water cycle.

And, you know, those natural forces as the basis of our design.

So we're also intimately connected with people's living experiences in all the spaces that we've built really shape people's experience.

So we can we have a role to play in the bigger discussion of climate change and human health.

And we have work to do.

Thanks to my take home message.

These are so similar since work together.

So like what I did for my study, the urban greening increase and greening is not just a matter of the urban forestry or landscape architecture.

I actually worked together with the planning, sociology and even computer science to kind of find a better solution.

So and even today we kind of showed off a similar topic, but we showed a different approach, like our design approach and also we showed a comprehensive system in the kinds of the collecting data on.

We saw it and we also showed some of the all kinds of studies.

So you might want to yeah, we can work together to make it better society.

So save the world.

Yes, I got to just say nature be solution.

Whether you want to buy a little potted plant that would make you happy as an individual at a plant or in designer.

Think about three trees or a queen for structure.

So more.

I think there is something in nature that will help us deal with these grand challenges around climate change or other bigger solutions.

Thank you for your time.

I was terrific.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Lee.

Dr. Lee, wonderful to have you here.

Terrific presentation, great content.

Much for us to consider and think about.

And thank you for pointing to the research horizons that are out there, opportunities not just in your field, but for our two fields to work together.

Terrific.

Thanks so much for being here and we'll look forward to seeing you next time on the Architecture for Health Lecture series.

Thanks for joining us.