On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees.
The heat index, which measures how the temperature actually feels on the body, would hit 126 degrees by the time
the day was over. Meteorologists had been warning residents about a two-day heat wave, but these temperatures did
not end that soon. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; the records for electrical
use were shattered; and power grids had failed, leaving residents without electricity for up to two days. And by
July 20, over seven hundred people had perished--more than twice the number that died in the Chicago Fire of 1871,
twenty times the number of those struck by Hurricane Andrew in 1992--in the great Chicago heat wave, one of the
deadliest in American history.
Though we seldom hear about them, during a typical year more people die in heat waves in the United States than
in all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming number or the
heartbreaking manner of the deaths resulting from the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Meteorologists and medical scientists
have been unable to account for the scale of the trauma, and political officials have puzzled over the sources
of the city's vulnerability. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct
what he calls a "social autopsy," examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city
that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been.
Starting with the question of why so many people died at home alone, Klinenberg investigates why some neighborhoods
experienced greater mortality than others, how the city government responded to the crisis, and how journalists,
scientists, and public officials reported on and explained these events. Through a combination of years of fieldwork,
extensive interviews, and archival research, Klinenberg uncovers how a number of surprising and unsettling forms
of social breakdown--including the literal and social isolation of seniors, the institutional abandonment of poor
neighborhoods, and the retrenchment of public assistance programs--contributed to the high fatality rates. The
human catastrophe, he argues, cannot simply be blamed on the failures of any particular individuals or organizations.
For when hundreds of people die behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community
groups, and public agencies, everyone is implicated in their demise.
As Klinenberg demonstrates in this incisive and gripping account of the contemporary urban condition, the widening
cracks in the social foundations of American cities that the 1995 Chicago heat wave made visible have by no means
subsided as the temperatures returned to normal. The forces that affected Chicago so disastrously remain in play
in America's cities, and we ignore them at our peril.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE: The Urban Inferno
INTRODUCTION: The City of Extremes
1. Dying Alone: The Social Production of Isolation
2. Race, Place, and Vulnerability: Urban Neighborhoods and the Ecology of Support
3. The State of Disaster: City Services in the Empowerment Era
4. Governing by Public Relations
5. The Spectacular City: News Organizations and the Representation of Catastrophe
CONCLUSION: Emerging Dangers in the Urban Environment
EPILOGUE: Together in the End
Notes
Bibliography
Index