Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
Eric Klinenberg • 2002
Devastation Rating
natural disaster heat race inequality
Our Take
In 1995, Chicago's heat killed over seven hundred people in a week — mostly elderly, mostly Black, mostly alone. Klinenberg's social autopsy asks who they were and why they died isolated. His answer is structural: poverty, neighbourhood disinvestment, the privatisation of public space. A disaster so preventable it becomes an indictment. The heat didn't kill them. Loneliness and policy did.
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