On a 90-degree day in Los Angeles, bus riders line up in the shadows cast by street signs and telephone poles, looking for relief from the sun's glaring heat. Every summer such scenes play out across the United States, and heat waves are now among the country's deadliest natural disasters. Physical health, mental health, and crime statistics are worse in neighborhoods without trees and the shade they provide. Increasingly, finding shade is a matter of life and death, and as journalist Sam Bloch argues, we ignore its benefits at our own peril. Shade was once a staple of human civilization. In Mesopotamia and Northern Africa, cities were built densely so that public passageways would be in shadow in the heat of the day. The Greeks famously philosophized in shady agoras. Even today, in Spain's sunny Seville, political careers are imperiled when leaders fail to put out the public shades in time for summer heat. But in the United States, air-conditioning and the dominance of cars took away the impetus to shade our rapidly growing cities. Though a few heroic planners and architects developed shady designs, the removal of trees in favor of wider roads and underinvestment in public spaces created a society where citizens retreat to their own cooled spaces, if they can, or face dangerous heat outdoors. Bloch examines the key role that shade plays not only in protecting human health and enhancing urban life and lays out the ways that innovative architects, public leaders, and entrepreneurs are reviving shade to protect vulnerable people--and maybe even save the planet. Ambitious and far-reaching, Shade helps us see a crucially important subject in a new light.
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