In 2023, images circulated online of a magenta steel shade structure in Los Angeles: La Sombrita, a roughly 2-foot-wide, 10-foot-tall swiveling panel of perforated metal that seemed more useful on a grill than for providing relief to people waiting for the bus. The project was meant to showcase a new type of shade infrastructure, something that could be replicated along the 120 bus routes in LA County, which serve more than 700,000 daily riders. But a complex permitting system for bus shelters and narrow sidewalk clearances meant that a project once imagined to include seating, a canopy, and a digital screen was whittled down to a metal pole. The project went viral on urban planning and heat-policy X/Twitter, becoming a skinny totem of poorly executed infrastructure projects. But the spatula-shade controversy ended up perfectly embodying America’s relationship with extreme heat: we know it’s a deadly hazard, but we can’t seem to prioritize the maintenance and creation of shade and other cooling infrastructure.
Related: Milan Design Week: 7 New Sustainable Products
As summer officially begins, Sam Bloch’s book, Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource (Penguin Random House, 2025), offers a timely argument that the neglect of shade and cooling infrastructure is not merely a design failure but a cultural one. The book is a much-needed addition to the relatively sparse setting of accessible writing on heat.
Why Heat Doesn’t Get the Attention of Floods or Storms
Extreme heat kills more people annually in the U.S. than any other weather event, yet it rarely produces the dramatic images that drive news coverage. Flooding has Subway Creatures Instagram posts and disaster movies. Heat has none of that visual drama, partly because it harms people already pushed to the margins: farmworkers, unhoused people, and low-income residents.
Related: Wayfair cuts fire pits, tables up to 68%
Bloch’s focus on shade begins to make visible a system whose invisibility is itself the problem. He argues that ordinary, everyday shade must be reframed as essential public infrastructure. The book is organized into three sections: a history of shade in nature and early societies, the mid-century turn toward air conditioning during the postwar housing boom, and contemporary experiments in rethinking cooling in the face of climate change. Bloch is strongest in his middle section, where he combines ethnographic reporting with sharp policy analysis. He follows the lives of Angelenos handling deadly summer heat. He recounts the story of Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, a 17-year-old farmworker who died of visceral multiorgan hyperthermia after working for hours in the direct sun on a 95-degree day in a California vineyard. Her death spurred regulations intended to protect agricultural workers, but as Bloch details, enforcement is weak, and undocumented workers risk their safety in demanding safer conditions.
Related: Dyson tower fan delivers quiet power
What makes this especially damning is that the federal government already knows how to keep outdoor workers safe and alive in extreme heat. The U.S. military maintains one of the most sophisticated heat-safety protocols in the world: acclimatization periods that gradually expose recruits to higher temperatures, training schedules tied to wet bulb globe temperature.