Using community science and participatory data practices to visualize Atlanta heat islands.

Extreme heat deaths disproportionately affect marginalized communities particularly within high density urban spaces like Atlanta, leading to environmental racism affecting hundreds of lives. Many of the community development projects designed to help address this harm caused by urban heat islands, make decisions based on findings with no input from said communities.

The goal of UrbanHeatATL is to provide a participatory approach to mapping and analyzing data around urban heat islands by arming community members with the technology and resources to map this data themselves and foster local discussions on their own environmental data.

In working with UrbanHeatATL, one of my primary goals was to strengthen the existing data processing infrastructure that creates geospatial data visualizations based on the temperature data gathered from the heat sensors that community members carried as they walked around their neighborhoods. For this I utilized Jupyter Notebook scripts to automate the cleaning and processing of Google Sheets data.

More recently, I have been working to design multi-media workshop tools and experiences that guide community members in reflecting on and analyzing data around their environments and their relationships to it.

Learn more about the community-led scientific research process we used here.