Billy Fleming

Billy Fleming is the Wilks Family Director for the Ian L. McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and the Visiting Diana Balmori Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture (2022-23). He is a co-founder of the Climate + Community Project — an interdisciplinary applied research practice that links leaders and demands from the climate-justice movement to progressive legislators. He is also a co-editor of Design With Nature Now (Lincoln, 2019) and A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation (Island Press, 2021), author of Building Post-Carbon Futures (Lincoln, exp. 2024) and Drowning America (Penn Press, forthcoming 2024), and co-Principal Investigator for the Megapolitan Adaptation Coastal Hub — a major interdisciplinary research cluster based at Rutgers University and funded by the National Science Foundation. Before coming to Penn, Fleming worked on urban policy development in the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Obama Administration. He co-authored The Indivisible Guide — from a progressive, grassroots organization with more than member 6,000 groups — and co-created Data Refuge, an international consortium of scientists, librarians, and programmers working to preserve vital environmental data at risk of erasure during the Trump Administration. His work has been published in CityLab, The Guardian, Houston Chronicle, Landscape Journal, Dissent Magazine, Jacobin, and LA+, among others.