Billy Fleming

Wilks Family Director, Ian L. McHarg Center


Billy Fleming is the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg
Center in the Weitzman School of Design, a senior fellow with
Data for Progress, and co-director of the "climate + community
project." 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, Billy 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). Billy
is also the lead author of the recently published and widely
acclaimed “The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal.”
He is also a co-author of the Indivisible
Guide (2016).


Along with Daniel Aldana Cohen, Billy co-directs the climate +
community project (ccp), which works to connect the
demands of the climate justice movement to the policy
development process. ccp aim to do this by developing new,
investment-forward public policy proposals under the framework
of the Decade of the Green New Deal that target the
intersection of climate justice and the built environment. Its
focus has been on foregrounding the role of public housing,
public schools, public transportation, public power, public
land, and public works in local, state, national, and
international climate policy discourse. This work has already
resulted in applied policy research and model legislation in
the housing, schools, transportation, and electricity sectors,
filling a critical gap between the demands of the climate
justice movement, the appetite for substantial new policy
content from sitting legislators, and the desire of a rising
generation of scholars to contribute to their work (including
Olufemi Taiwo, Akira Drake Rodridguez, Yonah Freemark, Thea
Riofrancos, and Shalanda Baker).


His writing on climate, disaster, and design has also been
published in The Guardian, The Atlantic, CityLab, Dissent
Magazine, Houston Chronicle, Jacobin, Places Journal,
and Science for the People Magazine, and he’s 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, Pew Center for Arts
and Heritage, William Penn Foundation,Summit Foundation,
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hewlett Foundation, and by a variety
of sponsors in the design and building industry.


Prior to joining Penn, he worked as a landscape architect, city
planner, organizer, and, later, in the Obama Administration’s
White House Domestic Policy Council. He holds a bachelor of
landscape architecture (University of Arkansas), master of
community and regional planning (University of Texas), and a
doctorate of city and regional planning (University of
Pennsylvania).