The Dark Side of a Bright Future: Shady Strategies to Survive Climate Chang

Please join the University of Oregon’s Portland Architecture Program and City of Possibility on Wednesday, January 14 at 6:00pm for a book talk and conversation with Sam Bloch, author of Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. This is a public event in the Winter 2026 UO School of Architecture & Environment Lecture Series, co-sponsored by Design Portland and SOJ. The event is free for students and UO affiliates. RSVP here.

Presented with sponsorship from SOJ

Note that this event will be held at the City of Possibility space in downtown Portland (JK Gill Building, 426 SW Harvey Milk St.).

Talk Description: Shade plays a vital role in enhancing livability, human health, and sustainability in Portland—a historically temperate city now known for killer summer heat. As global climate change and runaway urban development raises local temperatures, access to shade is already becoming essential for survivability and environmental justice. Learn how awnings, trees, and more thoughtful urban design can cool the city, reduce energy costs and carbon emissions, and make Portland safer and more accessible to all. Shade's distribution reflects profound inequalities—and expanding it can be a critical step in shaping Portland's cooler and fairer future.

Sam Bloch is an environmental journalist and the author of Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource, a "compelling ... conversation-starter" (NPR) named one of The New Yorker's best books of the year. Previously a staff writer at The Counter, Bloch has written about the intersection of climate change and urban design for Places Journal, Slate, CityLab, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and The New York Times, and has been published by L.A. Weekly, Art in America, Artnet and others. Bloch is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and a former MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow and Emerson Collective Fellow. He is based in New York City, where he lives with his partner and their son.
In Shade, a New Yorker "Best Book of the Year," author Sam Bloch examines the key role that shade plays not only in protecting human health and enhancing urban life, but also looks toward the ways that innovative architects, city leaders, and climate entrepreneurs are looking to revive it to protect vulnerable people—and maybe even save the planet. Ambitious and far-reaching, Shade helps us see a crucially important subject in a new light.