Assignment Prompt & Instructions
No plagio, ni inteligencia artificial
**files (1)**
– ## Intructionweek4.docx
**## Intructionweek4.docx**
Choose
**one** of the three readings from the textbook chapter titled
_Theme: Language and Politics_. Read the text, then write a five-paragraph
**argumentative essay**. Be reminded that this is an argumentative essay, which means that in addition to your arguments, you also need to present the counterarguments. When presenting the counterarguments, provide examples of logical fallacies commonly used; explain the type of logical fallacy. Do not forget to add the rebuttal after the counterargument. Do not quote; instead, paraphrase.
Please note that you can submit your essay only once.
Plagiarism is not tolerated;
_TurnItIn_ will be activated to avoid plagiarism.
You need to type the essay in a Word document and follow APA style.
Write
**a five-paragraph** **argumentative essay** based on
**one** of the three topics provided below. Pay attention when developing your arguments and counterarguments.
Please note that
**each topic comes with an article** that you need to read beforehand. Somewhere in your essay, you need to
**cite the accompanying article at least once**; if you wish, you can also cite other articles, but this one is a must. The article assigned to the topic should not be analyzed as a primary source but should only serve as supporting evidence either for one of your arguments or counterarguments. The accompanying articles are attached to this assignment, and they also provide a direct link for the article itself. Please
**do not quote; instead, you should paraphrase**.
Please note that you must submit this essay as a Word document and ensure it follows
**proper APA format** and structure. Click
[here](https://mri.mrooms.net/pluginfile.php/1233281/mod_assign/intro/Here.docx?time=1774273842905) to see a
**Sample.**
**Topics:**
1-Read this article: The Dangers of Visual Culture
2-Read the article titled " Strength in Numbers
3-
[Screams of the World](https://niemanreports.org/how-newsrooms-handle-graphic-images-of-violence/)
Articulo 1
## The dangers of visual culture: the power to control and manipulate images is democratizing, but it may also undermine trust.
Link/Page Citation
The average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day–images on television, in newspapers and magazines, on Web sites, and on the sides of buses. Images also grace soda cans, T-shirts, and billboards, and Internet search engines can instantly procure images for practically any word you type.
On Flickr.com, a photo-sharing Web site, you can type in a word such as "love" and find amateur digital photos of couples in steamy embrace or parents hugging their children. Type in "terror," and among the results is a photograph of the World Trade Center towers burning. "Remember when this was a shocking image?" asks the person who posted the picture.
The question is not merely rhetorical. It points to something important about images in our culture: They have, by their sheer number and ease of replication, become less magical and less shocking–a situation unknown until fairly recently in human history. Until the development of mass reproduction, images carried more power and evoked more fear. The second of the Ten Commandments listed in Exodus 20 warns against idolizing, or even making, graven images: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."
During the English Reformation, Henry VIII's advisor Thomas Cromwell led the effort to destroy religious images and icons in the country's churches and monasteries, and was successful enough that few survive to this day. The 2001 decision by the Taliban government in Afghanistan to destroy images throughout the country–including the two towering stone Buddhas carved into the cliffs of Bamiyan–is only the most recent example of this impulse. Political leaders have long feared images and taken extreme measures to control and manipulate them. The anonymous minions of manipulators who sanitized photographs at the behest of Stalin (a man who seemingly never met an enemy he didn't murder and then airbrush from history) are perhaps the best known example. Control of images has long been a preoccupation of the powerful.
Today, anyone with a digital camera and a personal computer can produce and alter an image. As a result, the power of the image has been diluted in one sense, but strengthened in another. It has been diluted by the ubiquity of images and the many populist technologies (like inexpensive cameras and picture-editing software) that give almost everyone the power to create, distort, and transmit images. But it has been strengthened by the gradual capitulation of the printed word to pictures, particularly moving pictures. Text ceded to image might be likened to an articulate person being rendered mute, forced to communicate via gesture and expression rather than language.
People love images. We love the democratizing power of technologies–such as digital cameras, video cameras, Photoshop, and PowerPoint–that give us the capability to make and manipulate images. What we are less eager to consider are the broader cultural effects of a society devoted to the image. Historians and anthropologists have explored the story of mankind's movement from an oral-based culture to a written culture, and later to a printed one. But it is only in the past several decades that we have begun to assimilate the effects of the move from a culture based on the printed word to one based largely on images.
In making images rather than texts our guide, are we opening up new vistas for understanding and expression, creating a form of communication that is "better than print," as New York University communications professor Mitchell Stephens has argued? Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies–perhaps creating a world of hieroglyphics and ideograms (albeit technologically sophisticated ones)–and in the process becoming, as the late Daniel Boorstin argued, slavishly devoted to the enchanting and superficial image at the expense of the deeper truths that the written word alone can convey?
Two things in particular are at stake in our contemporary confrontation with an image-based culture. First, technology has considerably undermined our ability to trust what we see, yet we have not adequately grappled with the effects of this on our notions of truth. Second, if we are indeed moving from the era of the printed word to an era dominated by the image, what impact will this have on culture, broadly speaking, and its institutions? What will art, literature, and music look like in the age of the image? And will we, in the age of the image, become too easily accustomed to verisimilar rather than true things, preferring appearance to reality and in the process rejecting the demands of discipline and patience that true things often require of us if we are to understand their meaning and describe it with precision?
The potential costs of moving from the printed word to the image are immense. We may find ourselves in a world where our ability to communicate is stunted, our understanding and acceptance of what we see questionable, and our desire to transmit culture from one generation to the next seriously compromised.
About the Author
Christine Rosen is the author of several books, including, most recently, My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of Divine Girlhood (Public Affairs, 2006). She is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and senior editor at The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society. A longer version of her article is available at
[www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/10/rosen.htm](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/10/rosen.htm)).
RELATED ARTICLE: Facts on Literacy
\* Some 35 million U.S. adults have difficulty with common literacy tasks such as completing forms or finding information in a text. Around 40 to 41 million Americans, or 21%-23% of the adult population, read at the lowest literacy level.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics.
\* Globally, approximately 861 million adults were illiterate in 2002. The vast majority, nearly 70%, live in nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as East and South Asia, including India, China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
Source: UNESCO-Education For All Global Monitoring Report, 2005.
\* In a 2001 U.S. Association of Manufacturers poll, U.S. employers ranked poor reading skills as the second most serious skill deficiency among current hourly employees, behind only worker attitude, timeliness, and attendance.
Source: The National Association of Manufacturers.
\* Between 1982 and 2002, young adults (age 18-24) went from being one of the most-likely groups to read literature to one of the least likely. The rate of decline for adults aged 18-24 was -28% compared with -18% for the overall population.
Source: The National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America.
\* In 2005, approximately 11% of incoming college freshmen in the United States required a remedial reading course, and 14% required remedial writing. The need for remedial reading is the leading predictor that a student will drop out of college. Remediation costs the United States $3.7 billion a year, including a $2.3 billion loss to the economy due to the diminished earning power of students who do not have a degree.
Source: The Alliance for Excellent Education, 2006.
[www.all4ed.org](https://www.all4ed.org/).
COPYRIGHT 2007 World Future Society
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 2022 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
**Please bookmark with social media, your votes are noticed and appreciated:**
**Articulo 2:**
Strength In Numbers Klinenberg, Eric . Wired ; San Francisco Vol. 24, Iss. 11, (Nov 2016): n/a. ProQuest document link ABSTRACT Eric Klinenberg discusses his research to understand why two poor neighborhoods in Chicago experienced very different outcomes during a heat wave that settled over the city for three days in 1995. Klinenberg found that the neighborhood that fared best had a stronger social infrastructure and suggests that developing tight-knit communities around the world is necessary to survive climate change. FULL TEXT STRENGTH IN NUMBERS TO SURVIVE CLIMATE CHANGE, WE NEED TO BUILD TIGHT-KNIT COMMUNITIES AROUND THE WORLD. In the summer of 1995, a blistering heat wave settled over Chicago for three days. It killed 739 people, making it one of the most unexpectedly lethal disasters in modern American history. No statistical models of the heat wave predicted such a high death toll. Researchers in the American Journal of Public Health reported that their analysis "failed to detect relationships between the weather and mortality that would explain what happened." Just as mysterious as the number of fatalities was the way they were distributed across the city. Several of the most deadly areas were entirely black and disproportionately poor, but so were three of the least deadly. Adjacent areas that looked alike–like Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two hyper-segregated black South Side neighborhoods with high poverty and crime–suffered vastly different effects. Scientists who study urban breakdowns like this usually focus on hard-line infrastructure: electrical grids, transit networks, communications systems, water lines, and the like. And to be sure, Chicago's aging infrastructure was woefully equipped for extreme heat. The power grid failed, leaving tens of thousands without air conditioning. Roads buckled and drawbridges locked, leading to gridlock and long ambulance response times. But those failures blanketed the entire city; they didn't explain the patchwork death toll. After a killer heat wave in Chicago, sociologist Eric Klinenberg set out to discover why some neighborhoods fared better than others. As a young sociologist who grew up in Chicago, I wanted to figure out why the heat wave killed who it did, where it did. So I set out to examine those pairs of "neighboring neighborhoods" that should have fared similarly but didn't. Englewood and Auburn Gresham may have looked similar on paper. But when I got to know them at street level, they came to look like different worlds. Englewood had been hemorrhaging for decades: first the employers; next the banks, groceries, and restaurants; finally the people. Residents described the area as "bombed out" and "abandoned." Empty lots, boarded-up houses, and broken, uneven sidewalks discouraged people from going outside, especially older people. During the heat wave, the residents of Englewood tended to hunker down in the safety of their homes–which became brick ovens. Englewood's death rate was among the highest in the city. Auburn Gresham, on the other hand, never lost its core institutions or its people. Stores, restaurants, community organizations, and churches animated its streets, and people hung out on the sidewalks. Older people there belonged to block clubs; residents assured me they knew who they had to keep tabs on during the heat wave. Auburn Gresham has long been regarded as one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago; but its death rate, three per 100,000, was among the lowest in the heat wave–far lower, in fact, than many of the wealthy white neighborhoods across town. Throughout the city, the variable that best explained the pattern of mortality during the Chicago heat wave was what people in my discipline call social infrastructure. Places with active commercial corridors, a variety of public spaces, local institutions, decent sidewalks, and community organizations fared well in the disaster. More socially barren places did not. Turns out neighborhood conditions that isolate people from each other on a good day can, on a really bad day, become lethal. This is important, because climate change virtually guarantees that, in the next century, major cities all over the world will endure longer, more frequent, and more intense heat waves–along with frankenstorms, hurricanes, blizzards, and rising seas. And it's inevitable that cities will take steps to fortify themselves against this future. The first instinct of urban leaders is often to harden their cities through engineering and infrastructure, much of which is indeed pretty vital. But research keeps reinforcing the lessons of Englewood and Auburn Gresham. Just as the temperature of a heat wave, the height of a storm surge, or the thickness of a levee, it's the strength of a neighborhood that determines who lives and who dies in a disaster. Building against climate change can either support vibrant neighborhood conditions or undermine them. We know how to do both. A winning plan to buttress New York against climate change essentially swathes lower Manhattan in a fortress of storm protection disguised as a smorgasbord of public space. A winning plan to buttress New York against climate change essentially swathes lower Manhattan in a fortress of storm protection disguised as a smorgasbord of public space. In October 2012, Superstorm Sandy smashed into New York. With 30-foot waves and 14-foot surges, the storm killed 24 people on Staten Island alone, ripped into the Jersey shore, and swamped lower Manhattan, one of the most densely populated zones in the US and home to thousands of public housing units, massive hospitals, major underground transit hubs, and several of the world's largest corporations and financial institutions. When a major electrical substation in the East Village took on 4 feet of water, it exploded and snuffed out power for about 250,000 people below midtown. The outage left some of the most impoverished and some of the most affluent people in the city alike stranded on high floors of apartment buildings without water, electricity, or elevator service for nearly a week. Like the Chicago heat wave, Sandy turned up evidence for the importance of social infrastructure. A study conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center and the Associated Press showed that residents of neighborhoods with low levels of social cohesion–as measured by how much people said they trusted their neighbors–reported longer recovery times. Much of the initial response to the storm, however, focused on hard infrastructure. Prominent climate scientists and engineers called for vast, colossally expensive seawalls around big cities and on coast lines. Even in pure engineering terms, sea gates and seawalls can impart a false sense of security: They can accelerate coastal erosion, and if they fail, they can fail catastrophically. They also erode the quality of neighborhoods; when an oceanfront area turns into a fortress, people lose their connections to the water, and street life dries up. Who wants to live behind an enormous seawall? (Plus, storm surge has to go somewhere. Who wants to live where the wall ends?) Luckily, officials have started to embrace the idea that social infrastructure is as essential to resilience as the hard stuff. In 2013, I started serving–at the behest of the White House–as the research director for an international competition called Rebuild by Design. The competition's purpose was to allocate around $1 billion for major projects that would make the areas affected by Sandy more resilient against climate change and serve as pilots for the rest of the country. And a major requirement of the competition was that the projects should improve social infrastructure. WHEN THE FLOODS COME, NEIGHBORS ARE THE TRUE FIRST RESPONDERS. The six winning plans were announced in 2014. The highest-profile project, by architect Bjarke Ingels and the BIG Team along with One Architecture, essentially swathes lower Manhattan in a fortress of storm protection disguised as a smorgasbord of public space. The portion of the design proposed for the Lower East Side–which is, for now, the only funded part of the project–lines the waterfront with lushly planted berms that give pedestrians easier access to a slew of amenities on the water's edge. The berms, which are 18.5 feet at their peak, absorb storm surges when necessary, but their everyday function is just as important: serving as parklands and recreational areas for people who live in an especially gray and unpleasant part of an especially gray city. Another winning design–far more low-key and far less expensive–will subtly transform the coastline of Staten Island. Being directly exposed to the Atlantic, Staten absorbed waves so large during Sandy that they tore through communities blocks from the ocean, where no one expected a deluge. Working from computer models of waves and tidal flow, the landscape design firm Scape proposed a necklace of submerged reefs and oyster beds to rim the island's Atlantic coast–partially man-made, partially natural structures that will promote sedimentation and absorb a tremendous amount of wave energy. But not all of it. Scape's plan makes a point of acknowledging the inescapable fact that water is coming: Part of the project even launches a new school curriculum to teach kids on the island how their fate is linked to the fate of the oceans. It also links people in the area to each other, with plans for the construction of several cultural and educational hubs along the shore. Neither project is under construction yet; the plan for lower Manhattan has received $335 million dollars in federal funding, and the Staten Island project has received $60 million. Both could get steered off course. Late-stage budget cuts could reduce the Lower East Side's verdant berms to an ugly and imposing seawall, exactly the kind of project that Rebuild by Design was supposed to reject. But so far the plans have wide support from local and federal offices, and other cities around the world have taken notice. People are realizing that when the floods come or the heat wave settles, neighbors are the true first responders. Next up, we'll be able to focus on an even more urgent problem: reducing our greenhouse gas emissions before there's no way to adapt. Eric Klinenberg (@EricKlinenberg) is a professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is a coauthor (with Aziz Ansari) of Modern Romance: An Investigation . Credit: CAIT OPPERMANN;BY Eric KlinenbergPHOTOGRAPH BY CAIT OPPERMANN
**## Intructionweek4.docx**
Choose
**one** of the three readings from the textbook chapter titled
_Theme: Language and Politics_. Read the text, then write a five-paragraph
**argumentative essay**. Be reminded that this is an argumentative essay, which means that in addition to your arguments, you also need to present the counterarguments. When presenting the counterarguments, provide examples of logical fallacies commonly used; explain the type of logical fallacy. Do not forget to add the rebuttal after the counterargument. Do not quote; instead, paraphrase.
Please note that you can submit your essay only once.
Plagiarism is not tolerated;
_TurnItIn_ will be activated to avoid plagiarism.
You need to type the essay in a Word document and follow APA style.
Write
**a five-paragraph** **argumentative essay** based on
**one** of the three topics provided below. Pay attention when developing your arguments and counterarguments.
Please note that
**each topic comes with an article** that you need to read beforehand. Somewhere in your essay, you need to
**cite the accompanying article at least once**; if you wish, you can also cite other articles, but this one is a must. The article assigned to the topic should not be analyzed as a primary source but should only serve as supporting evidence either for one of your arguments or counterarguments. The accompanying articles are attached to this assignment, and they also provide a direct link for the article itself. Please
**do not quote; instead, you should paraphrase**.
Please note that you must submit this essay as a Word document and ensure it follows
**proper APA format** and structure. Click
[here](https://mri.mrooms.net/pluginfile.php/1233281/mod_assign/intro/Here.docx?time=1774273842905) to see a
**Sample.**
**Topics:**
1-Read this article: The Dangers of Visual Culture
2-Read the article titled " Strength in Numbers
3-
[Screams of the World](https://niemanreports.org/how-newsrooms-handle-graphic-images-of-violence/)
Articulo 1
## The dangers of visual culture: the power to control and manipulate images is democratizing, but it may also undermine trust.
Link/Page Citation
The average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day–images on television, in newspapers and magazines, on Web sites, and on the sides of buses. Images also grace soda cans, T-shirts, and billboards, and Internet search engines can instantly procure images for practically any word you type.
On Flickr.com, a photo-sharing Web site, you can type in a word such as "love" and find amateur digital photos of couples in steamy embrace or parents hugging their children. Type in "terror," and among the results is a photograph of the World Trade Center towers burning. "Remember when this was a shocking image?" asks the person who posted the picture.
The question is not merely rhetorical. It points to something important about images in our culture: They have, by their sheer number and ease of replication, become less magical and less shocking–a situation unknown until fairly recently in human history. Until the development of mass reproduction, images carried more power and evoked more fear. The second of the Ten Commandments listed in Exodus 20 warns against idolizing, or even making, graven images: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."
During the English Reformation, Henry VIII's advisor Thomas Cromwell led the effort to destroy religious images and icons in the country's churches and monasteries, and was successful enough that few survive to this day. The 2001 decision by the Taliban government in Afghanistan to destroy images throughout the country–including the two towering stone Buddhas carved into the cliffs of Bamiyan–is only the most recent example of this impulse. Political leaders have long feared images and taken extreme measures to control and manipulate them. The anonymous minions of manipulators who sanitized photographs at the behest of Stalin (a man who seemingly never met an enemy he didn't murder and then airbrush from history) are perhaps the best known example. Control of images has long been a preoccupation of the powerful.
Today, anyone with a digital camera and a personal computer can produce and alter an image. As a result, the power of the image has been diluted in one sense, but strengthened in another. It has been diluted by the ubiquity of images and the many populist technologies (like inexpensive cameras and picture-editing software) that give almost everyone the power to create, distort, and transmit images. But it has been strengthened by the gradual capitulation of the printed word to pictures, particularly moving pictures. Text ceded to image might be likened to an articulate person being rendered mute, forced to communicate via gesture and expression rather than language.
People love images. We love the democratizing power of technologies–such as digital cameras, video cameras, Photoshop, and PowerPoint–that give us the capability to make and manipulate images. What we are less eager to consider are the broader cultural effects of a society devoted to the image. Historians and anthropologists have explored the story of mankind's movement from an oral-based culture to a written culture, and later to a printed one. But it is only in the past several decades that we have begun to assimilate the effects of the move from a culture based on the printed word to one based largely on images.
In making images rather than texts our guide, are we opening up new vistas for understanding and expression, creating a form of communication that is "better than print," as New York University communications professor Mitchell Stephens has argued? Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies–perhaps creating a world of hieroglyphics and ideograms (albeit technologically sophisticated ones)–and in the process becoming, as the late Daniel Boorstin argued, slavishly devoted to the enchanting and superficial image at the expense of the deeper truths that the written word alone can convey?
Two things in particular are at stake in our contemporary confrontation with an image-based culture. First, technology has considerably undermined our ability to trust what we see, yet we have not adequately grappled with the effects of this on our notions of truth. Second, if we are indeed moving from the era of the printed word to an era dominated by the image, what impact will this have on culture, broadly speaking, and its institutions? What will art, literature, and music look like in the age of the image? And will we, in the age of the image, become too easily accustomed to verisimilar rather than true things, preferring appearance to reality and in the process rejecting the demands of discipline and patience that true things often require of us if we are to understand their meaning and describe it with precision?
The potential costs of moving from the printed word to the image are immense. We may find ourselves in a world where our ability to communicate is stunted, our understanding and acceptance of what we see questionable, and our desire to transmit culture from one generation to the next seriously compromised.
About the Author
Christine Rosen is the author of several books, including, most recently, My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of Divine Girlhood (Public Affairs, 2006). She is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and senior editor at The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society. A longer version of her article is available at
[www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/10/rosen.htm](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/10/rosen.htm)).
RELATED ARTICLE: Facts on Literacy
\* Some 35 million U.S. adults have difficulty with common literacy tasks such as completing forms or finding information in a text. Around 40 to 41 million Americans, or 21%-23% of the adult population, read at the lowest literacy level.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics.
\* Globally, approximately 861 million adults were illiterate in 2002. The vast majority, nearly 70%, live in nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as East and South Asia, including India, China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
Source: UNESCO-Education For All Global Monitoring Report, 2005.
\* In a 2001 U.S. Association of Manufacturers poll, U.S. employers ranked poor reading skills as the second most serious skill deficiency among current hourly employees, behind only worker attitude, timeliness, and attendance.
Source: The National Association of Manufacturers.
\* Between 1982 and 2002, young adults (age 18-24) went from being one of the most-likely groups to read literature to one of the least likely. The rate of decline for adults aged 18-24 was -28% compared with -18% for the overall population.
Source: The National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America.
\* In 2005, approximately 11% of incoming college freshmen in the United States required a remedial reading course, and 14% required remedial writing. The need for remedial reading is the leading predictor that a student will drop out of college. Remediation costs the United States $3.7 billion a year, including a $2.3 billion loss to the economy due to the diminished earning power of students who do not have a degree.
Source: The Alliance for Excellent Education, 2006.
[www.all4ed.org](https://www.all4ed.org/).
COPYRIGHT 2007 World Future Society
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 2022 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
**Please bookmark with social media, your votes are noticed and appreciated:**
**Articulo 2:**
Strength In Numbers Klinenberg, Eric . Wired ; San Francisco Vol. 24, Iss. 11, (Nov 2016): n/a. ProQuest document link ABSTRACT Eric Klinenberg discusses his research to understand why two poor neighborhoods in Chicago experienced very different outcomes during a heat wave that settled over the city for three days in 1995. Klinenberg found that the neighborhood that fared best had a stronger social infrastructure and suggests that developing tight-knit communities around the world is necessary to survive climate change. FULL TEXT STRENGTH IN NUMBERS TO SURVIVE CLIMATE CHANGE, WE NEED TO BUILD TIGHT-KNIT COMMUNITIES AROUND THE WORLD. In the summer of 1995, a blistering heat wave settled over Chicago for three days. It killed 739 people, making it one of the most unexpectedly lethal disasters in modern American history. No statistical models of the heat wave predicted such a high death toll. Researchers in the American Journal of Public Health reported that their analysis "failed to detect relationships between the weather and mortality that would explain what happened." Just as mysterious as the number of fatalities was the way they were distributed across the city. Several of the most deadly areas were entirely black and disproportionately poor, but so were three of the least deadly. Adjacent areas that looked alike–like Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two hyper-segregated black South Side neighborhoods with high poverty and crime–suffered vastly different effects. Scientists who study urban breakdowns like this usually focus on hard-line infrastructure: electrical grids, transit networks, communications systems, water lines, and the like. And to be sure, Chicago's aging infrastructure was woefully equipped for extreme heat. The power grid failed, leaving tens of thousands without air conditioning. Roads buckled and drawbridges locked, leading to gridlock and long ambulance response times. But those failures blanketed the entire city; they didn't explain the patchwork death toll. After a killer heat wave in Chicago, sociologist Eric Klinenberg set out to discover why some neighborhoods fared better than others. As a young sociologist who grew up in Chicago, I wanted to figure out why the heat wave killed who it did, where it did. So I set out to examine those pairs of "neighboring neighborhoods" that should have fared similarly but didn't. Englewood and Auburn Gresham may have looked similar on paper. But when I got to know them at street level, they came to look like different worlds. Englewood had been hemorrhaging for decades: first the employers; next the banks, groceries, and restaurants; finally the people. Residents described the area as "bombed out" and "abandoned." Empty lots, boarded-up houses, and broken, uneven sidewalks discouraged people from going outside, especially older people. During the heat wave, the residents of Englewood tended to hunker down in the safety of their homes–which became brick ovens. Englewood's death rate was among the highest in the city. Auburn Gresham, on the other hand, never lost its core institutions or its people. Stores, restaurants, community organizations, and churches animated its streets, and people hung out on the sidewalks. Older people there belonged to block clubs; residents assured me they knew who they had to keep tabs on during the heat wave. Auburn Gresham has long been regarded as one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago; but its death rate, three per 100,000, was among the lowest in the heat wave–far lower, in fact, than many of the wealthy white neighborhoods across town. Throughout the city, the variable that best explained the pattern of mortality during the Chicago heat wave was what people in my discipline call social infrastructure. Places with active commercial corridors, a variety of public spaces, local institutions, decent sidewalks, and community organizations fared well in the disaster. More socially barren places did not. Turns out neighborhood conditions that isolate people from each other on a good day can, on a really bad day, become lethal. This is important, because climate change virtually guarantees that, in the next century, major cities all over the world will endure longer, more frequent, and more intense heat waves–along with frankenstorms, hurricanes, blizzards, and rising seas. And it's inevitable that cities will take steps to fortify themselves against this future. The first instinct of urban leaders is often to harden their cities through engineering and infrastructure, much of which is indeed pretty vital. But research keeps reinforcing the lessons of Englewood and Auburn Gresham. Just as the temperature of a heat wave, the height of a storm surge, or the thickness of a levee, it's the strength of a neighborhood that determines who lives and who dies in a disaster. Building against climate change can either support vibrant neighborhood conditions or undermine them. We know how to do both. A winning plan to buttress New York against climate change essentially swathes lower Manhattan in a fortress of storm protection disguised as a smorgasbord of public space. A winning plan to buttress New York against climate change essentially swathes lower Manhattan in a fortress of storm protection disguised as a smorgasbord of public space. In October 2012, Superstorm Sandy smashed into New York. With 30-foot waves and 14-foot surges, the storm killed 24 people on Staten Island alone, ripped into the Jersey shore, and swamped lower Manhattan, one of the most densely populated zones in the US and home to thousands of public housing units, massive hospitals, major underground transit hubs, and several of the world's largest corporations and financial institutions. When a major electrical substation in the East Village took on 4 feet of water, it exploded and snuffed out power for about 250,000 people below midtown. The outage left some of the most impoverished and some of the most affluent people in the city alike stranded on high floors of apartment buildings without water, electricity, or elevator service for nearly a week. Like the Chicago heat wave, Sandy turned up evidence for the importance of social infrastructure. A study conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center and the Associated Press showed that residents of neighborhoods with low levels of social cohesion–as measured by how much people said they trusted their neighbors–reported longer recovery times. Much of the initial response to the storm, however, focused on hard infrastructure. Prominent climate scientists and engineers called for vast, colossally expensive seawalls around big cities and on coast lines. Even in pure engineering terms, sea gates and seawalls can impart a false sense of security: They can accelerate coastal erosion, and if they fail, they can fail catastrophically. They also erode the quality of neighborhoods; when an oceanfront area turns into a fortress, people lose their connections to the water, and street life dries up. Who wants to live behind an enormous seawall? (Plus, storm surge has to go somewhere. Who wants to live where the wall ends?) Luckily, officials have started to embrace the idea that social infrastructure is as essential to resilience as the hard stuff. In 2013, I started serving–at the behest of the White House–as the research director for an international competition called Rebuild by Design. The competition's purpose was to allocate around $1 billion for major projects that would make the areas affected by Sandy more resilient against climate change and serve as pilots for the rest of the country. And a major requirement of the competition was that the projects should improve social infrastructure. WHEN THE FLOODS COME, NEIGHBORS ARE THE TRUE FIRST RESPONDERS. The six winning plans were announced in 2014. The highest-profile project, by architect Bjarke Ingels and the BIG Team along with One Architecture, essentially swathes lower Manhattan in a fortress of storm protection disguised as a smorgasbord of public space. The portion of the design proposed for the Lower East Side–which is, for now, the only funded part of the project–lines the waterfront with lushly planted berms that give pedestrians easier access to a slew of amenities on the water's edge. The berms, which are 18.5 feet at their peak, absorb storm surges when necessary, but their everyday function is just as important: serving as parklands and recreational areas for people who live in an especially gray and unpleasant part of an especially gray city. Another winning design–far more low-key and far less expensive–will subtly transform the coastline of Staten Island. Being directly exposed to the Atlantic, Staten absorbed waves so large during Sandy that they tore through communities blocks from the ocean, where no one expected a deluge. Working from computer models of waves and tidal flow, the landscape design firm Scape proposed a necklace of submerged reefs and oyster beds to rim the island's Atlantic coast–partially man-made, partially natural structures that will promote sedimentation and absorb a tremendous amount of wave energy. But not all of it. Scape's plan makes a point of acknowledging the inescapable fact that water is coming: Part of the project even launches a new school curriculum to teach kids on the island how their fate is linked to the fate of the oceans. It also links people in the area to each other, with plans for the construction of several cultural and educational hubs along the shore. Neither project is under construction yet; the plan for lower Manhattan has received $335 million dollars in federal funding, and the Staten Island project has received $60 million. Both could get steered off course. Late-stage budget cuts could reduce the Lower East Side's verdant berms to an ugly and imposing seawall, exactly the kind of project that Rebuild by Design was supposed to reject. But so far the plans have wide support from local and federal offices, and other cities around the world have taken notice. People are realizing that when the floods come or the heat wave settles, neighbors are the true first responders. Next up, we'll be able to focus on an even more urgent problem: reducing our greenhouse gas emissions before there's no way to adapt. Eric Klinenberg (@EricKlinenberg) is a professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is a coauthor (with Aziz Ansari) of Modern Romance: An Investigation . Credit: CAIT OPPERMANN;BY Eric KlinenbergPHOTOGRAPH BY CAIT OPPERMANN