Los Angeles offers a stark picture of how valuable shade can be. A single ficus tree downtown can draw dozens of people looking for relief from the heat. This small scene hints at a larger failure in city design and public priorities. Shade has become scarce even as the city grows hotter each year.
Journalist Sam Bloch explores this issue in Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. His book argues that shade is not just a comfort but a tool for public health, climate resilience, and social equity. Decades of planning decisions pushed cities toward air conditioning and away from natural cooling, leaving poor communities the most exposed.
Historically, Americans cooled their homes with open windows, stoops, and trees. The shift came in the early twentieth century as reformers praised sunlight as cleansing and architects celebrated glass and wide streets. With air conditioning spreading quickly, natural cooling fell out of favor, and dense shade lost status in modern design.
This retreat from outdoor life coincided with a move toward private space. Single-family zoning, sprawling suburbs, and sealed offices reduced the need for communal areas. Air conditioning allowed cities to expand into hot, arid regions while consuming massive amounts of energy. Comfort became manufactured, and shade was treated as optional.
Los Angeles exemplifies the consequences. Tree cover correlates strongly with race and income. Wealthier neighborhoods in the hills enjoy lush canopies, while lower-income parts of South L.A. are paved and exposed. The result is hotter streets, higher utility bills, and increased health risks for people already at a disadvantage.
City policy often compounds this inequality. Police and council offices have at times encouraged trimming or removing trees near homeless encampments to make life harder for those living on the streets. This “hostile architecture” approach removes a basic protection against deadly heat while failing to address the root causes of homelessness.
Efforts to reverse the trend have been inconsistent. Initiatives like planting 90,000 trees by 2021 fell far short. Budgets routinely cut maintenance for existing trees while allocating more funds to policing. Without stable funding and coordination between city agencies, even well-intentioned programs rarely achieve meaningful canopy growth.
Other cities show different outcomes. Barcelona redesigned blocks to prioritize pedestrians and maintain trees. Singapore manages irrigation to keep its streets green despite dense development. Australia has launched public health campaigns about sun safety. These examples prove that large, hot cities can treat shade as infrastructure rather than decoration.
Bloch suggests practical steps: merge overlapping departments, commit to long-term capital plans, and make shade part of every public works project. Low-tech, steady interventions are more realistic than grand but underfunded schemes. Urban planning choices made now will shape how people cope with rising temperatures in the decades ahead.
Shade is both a climate strategy and a social one. Trees cool neighborhoods, cut energy use, and make public life more inclusive. Ignoring it pushes cities toward deeper inequality and higher heat deaths. Choosing to plant, preserve, and value shade is choosing a livable future.
Based on reporting and analysis in “Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource” by Sam Bloch, discussed by Piper French in The New Republic (September 2025).