Tucson Grown
Research by heat expert and College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture Professor Ladd Keith is shaping climate solutions worldwide.
Ladd Keith ’03 ’05 ’19 grew up just miles from the University of Arizona campus in a neighborhood near Davis-Monthan Air Force Base called Terra del Sol — Latin for “land of the sun.” He spent his summers doing what most Tucson kids of his generation did during the summer: Holing up inside to play hours of video games like SimCity — a game that lets players design their own modern metropolises.
But Keith, now an associate professor in the U of A’s School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, may have become an extreme heat expert despite growing up in Tucson — not because of it. “I never really thought about the heat in the summer, because when you grow up in a place like this, the heat just becomes all you know,” he says.
Keith was in Japan right after his undergraduate program, on his first trip outside the U.S., when he began to understand what urban planning was. As he explored dense metro areas like Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, he couldn’t help but notice how much more walkable they were than his hometown. It was his first practical understanding of the field, and it inspired him to apply to the U of A’s urban planning master’s program a week after returning home.
“When I was on that trip, all of it collided — SimCity, Japan, Tucson — and I thought, ‘This would be a really cool direction to go in,’” Keith says.
Now, Keith is one of the country’s foremost experts on planning for extreme heat, the No. 1 weather-related cause of death in the U.S. Alongside his faculty appointment, he also is the director of the Heat Resilience Initiative in the university’s Arizona Institute for Resilience, and has led federal grants that help cities improve their response to extreme heat.
Before his epiphany in Japan, Keith attended the U of A College of Fine Arts on a writing scholarship and earned a bachelor’s degree in media arts. Still enamored with storytelling but unsure of his next move, he took the trip to Japan — and found his calling. After his master’s program, he was well on his way toward a planning career when Hurricane Katrina devastated cities like New Orleans. He was not near the disaster, but headlines about it helped sharpen his focus as a planner.
“I was just struck by the fact that, not only could we design our cities better, but some of them are very poorly designed for low-income folks and marginalized people,” Keith says. “I realized, not only do we need to plan our cities better, but we have to consider weather and climate change, too.”
As a master’s student, Keith got hands-on experience helping plan towns in Arizona, including Oro Valley and the unincorporated Arizona City in Pinal County. He later was appointed to the City of Tucson's planning commission, for which he served as chair and led the process for a new general plan in 2013.
Around that same time, Keith began his doctorate in the U of A Graduate Interdisciplinary Program for Arid Lands Resource Sciences, one of the first and only programs of its kind focused on desert climates. Keith’s focus was on understanding how cities across the Southwest were addressing climate change through urban planning. To his surprise, he says, climate change factored very little into the general plans for many Arizona cities that were growing hotter by the year.
Even fewer plans back then were considering heat the same way that plans would account for other natural disasters. Many other types of disasters have long been met with interdisciplinary solutions, Keith says — the federal government has tracked droughts, for example, since the Dust Bowl.
“Heat requires the same transdisciplinary approach, but it’s only recently been recognized as a serious hazard, so we didn’t know until a few years ago what connections needed to be made to address it,” he says.
As a social scientist, Keith often sees himself as the connective tissue for teams of climate scientists, public health professionals, fellow planners and other experts. And as a storyteller at heart, his goal with any project is to turn findings into practical results for as many people as possible.
“The storytelling and the results of my research are probably my favorite part of it,” he says.
Along with Sara Meerow, a frequent collaborator at Arizona State University, Keith co-wrote Planning for Urban Heat Resilience, a guide published in 2022 by the American Planning Association. It was the first of its kind to focus on extreme heat.
Keith then led the U of A’s share of the Southwest Urban Integrated Field Laboratory that spanned all three state universities to study the impact of extreme heat in Arizona’s metro areas. The program, funded by the Department of Energy, involved students and researchers from across the state taking detailed weather measurements in Arizona neighborhoods. Keith, as leader of the Heat Resilience Initiative, is now working to compile the data and translate the findings into plans or policy recommendations that could protect residents from increasingly hotter climates.
He’s led similar work on behalf of the U of A as part of the Center for Heat Resilient Communities, partnering with researchers from ASU and the University of California, Los Angeles. The project, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, took best practices and findings from leading city heat plans and translated them to more universal guides that other U.S. cities could implement.
One of Keith’s proudest contributions, he says, was serving as lead author on a 2021 comment article in the journal Nature. The article laid out a set of guidelines that city-level policymakers could use to ensure their city plans protect residents from the risks of extreme heat. The article informed the U.S. federal government’s National Heat Strategy and Maturity Model for Heat Governance in 2024 and the United Nations Extreme Heat Risk Governance Framework and Toolkit in 2025.
“As an academic, to have your work not only cited by other academics but actually used in federal and U.N. guiding documents is an incredible impact,” Keith says.
Even as his work extends its reach well beyond campus, Pima County and even the country, Keith never forgets where he came from.
“My connection to the desert is probably the clearest line through everything,” he says. “And I was absolutely shaped by the U of A’s land-grant mission. All of my research is focused on advancing society and returning practical benefits to people.”
In 2022, Keith helped define a basic framework for planning for urban heat resilience. Resilience strategies largely break down into two categories: mitigation strategies, such as building shade structures and green spaces that reduce the built environment’s contribution to urban heat, and management strategies, such as cooling centers and warning systems, to prepare for and respond to heat risks.
