Billy Fleming
Wilks Family Director, Ian L. McHarg Center in the Weitzman School of Design
Billy Fleming is the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center in The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and a senior Fellow with Data for Progress. His fellowship with Data for Progress has focused on the built environment impacts of climate change and resulted most prominently in the publication of low-carbon public housing policy briefs tied to the “Green New Deal for Public Housing Act” introduced in 2019. In his role at the McHarg Center, Mr. Fleming is co-editor of the forthcoming book An Adaptation Blueprint (Island Press, 2020), co-editor and co-curator of the book and now internationally-traveling exhibit Design With Nature Now (Lincoln, 2019), and author of the forthcoming Drowning America: The Nature and Politics of Adaptation (Penn Press, expected 2021). He is the lead author of the recently published and widely acclaimed “The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal”, and a co-author of the Indivisible Guide (2016).
Fleming’s writing on climate, disaster, and design has been published in The Guardian, The Atlantic, CityLab, Dissent Magazine, Houston Chronicle, Jacobin, Places Journal, and Science for the People Magazine, and he is frequently asked to weigh in on the infrastructure and built environment implications of climate change, as well as candidate and congressional climate plans, by major climate reporters and congressional staff. His research has been supported by grants from the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the William Penn Foundation, and by a variety of sponsors in the design and building industry.
Prior to joining Penn, Fleming worked as a landscape architect, city planner, organizer, and, later in the Obama Administration’s Domestic Policy Council. He holds a B.L.A. from the University of Arkansas, a M.S. in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas, and a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal. Image courtesy of Ian L. McHarg Center.