What will it take to make Baltimore a climate-resilient, 21st-century city?

For Ben Zaitchik, the moment had arrived. He’d been working at Johns Hopkins University for almost two years on a groundbreaking effort funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to define what it would take to make Baltimore climate-adaptive, resilient and just. Now, he paced nervously in a spacious corridor at Morgan State University’s Center for Built Environment and Infrastructure Studies, not far from Johns Hopkins’ main campus, making sure that everything was in order for the focus group meeting he had been planning for weeks. The topic: the urban heat island effect, his research specialty.