Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

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 thousands of residents without electricity for up to two days. Any by July 20, over 700 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. Heat waves in the United States kill more people during a typical year than 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 vulernability. 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 neighbourhoods 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 neighbourhoods, and the retrenchment of public assistance programmes - 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 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.

About the Author :
Eric Klinenberg is assistant professor of sociology and a faculty fellow of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He is the coeditor of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness and a regular contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique.

Review :
"A compelling narrative of urban catastrophe, Eric Klinenberg's 'social autopsy' yields deep insights into how we live and die in cities today. If there is any hope of reviving the best traditions of Chicago urban sociology, it resides with work like Heat Wave." - Studs Terkel; "Heat Wave is a remarkable investigation and a major piece of social research. Meticulously documented and beautifully written, the book is both a pathbreaking contribution to urban studies and a powerful account of social breakdowns in American life." - Richard Sennett; "Deeply moving events not only demand that we are appropriately moved, but also require that we investigate why they occur and how. By analyzing the social and political causes of so-called heat deaths, Eric Klinenberg has powerfully illuminated the causation and culpability associated with the terrible events in Chicago. The book is not only intellectually exciting but may also help to save a great many lives." - Amartya Sen