AIAJ Evening Lecture — Dr. Nataya Friedan on “Oil and water; climate urbanism in Houston, Texas”

Please follow the link for in-person and online registration, as well as venue details.
https://aiaj-02122026.peatix.com

LECTURE ABSTRACT

As climate change disasters worsen across the globe, it is clear that evidence does not necessarily lead to action. Instead, misinformation, conspiracy, and outright lies have created new forms of climate denial and mistrust in science, especially in the United States. This lecture uses ethnography to bring the climate conversation out of the abstract and down to the concrete of Houston, Texas. In the fall of 2019, Houston experienced the fifth 500-year flood in five years by the federal risk designations at the time. Despite scientific consensus and data specific to the Gulf Coast, many leaders in local government as well as the business community were calling the storms “just another wet cycle.” Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork beginning in 2018, this lecture follows civil servants, activists, politicians, and businesspeople as they grappled with climate change evidence in an oil industry town. In the day-to-day process of planning flood infrastructure, climate denial was a refusal to look backward as much as forward.

This lecture argues that the consequential falsehood determining action in Houston was not “climate change isn’t real” but “fuel is cheap.” This claim, whether in Houston or elsewhere, requires persistent denial of past liabilities as much as future climate impacts. This lecture looks at how these assumptions at the individual and political level play out on the ground and in Houston’s urban form.

When: Thursday, February 12 from 18:30-20:30
Venue: Hosted by Lutron at their showroom near Aoyama-Itchome Station
Joining Online via zoom: link coming soon
Meeting ID: 
Passcode: 
Attendees will earn CES Credits

Schedule
Doors Open 18:15
Introduction 18:30
Lutron 5 min
Lecture 18:45-19:30
Questions 19:30-19:45
Refreshments 19:45-20:15
Clean up and exit by 20:30

DR. NATAYA FRIEDAN BIO
Dr. Nataya Friedan is a Postdoctoral Associate in Urban Climate Mitigation and Adaptation at the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities. Friedan is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on climate adaptation and misinformation in North American cities. Her current book project, Selling Swampland to Yankees, is about the political life of scientific evidence in Houston, Texas, an oil industry town experiencing climate change impacts. Her ethnography follows businessmen, politicians, residents, and activists as they renegotiate the economic concept of externality in the day-to-day process of planning flood infrastructure. Friedan’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner Gren Foundation. Friedan was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. In 2023, she received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University.