Billy Fleming is an interdisciplinary scholar of climate justice. He is the co-founder and strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank that works with movements and elected officials to mobilize cutting-edge research on climate, economy, and everyday life.
He is a leading voice on the role that the design of our cities, communities, and landscapes plays in responding to the climate crisis. Billy's most recent book, Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (Lincoln, 2026) offers a comprehensive account of the myriad ways in which people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems to create more just, beautiful places in response to the climate crisis. Its illustrative case studies, featuring more than 500 photographs and maps, foreground the often-overlooked tactics, strategies, and modes of practice being employed, often by marginalized peoples, to build a more just, decarbonized world.
Billy is now collaborating with Douglas Robb, a multidisciplinary climate justice scholar, on a project titled "Recarbonization: Land, Capital, and The Spatial Fix of Energy Transitions" that is organized around the urgency of clean energy development and the new wave of spatial transformation it is producing. It aims to document, assess, and critically investigate an emergent network of sites, systems, and spatial configurations that are producing a form of global reindustrialization that is already increasing carbon emissions even as renewable energy capacity expands. This project will form the basis of a new book project and symposium, to be held at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in the Fall of 2027.
His work has been widely published in major book projects, leading academic journals, and in the popular press. Billy's previous book projects include Design With Nature Now (Lincoln, 2019) and A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation (Island Press, 2021). His scholarly work has been published in Landscape Journal, the Journal of Landscape Architecture, the Journal of Architectural Education, LA+, Log, Social Text, Places Journal, and Socio-Ecological Practice Research. He has also contributed to volumes like Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, The Landscape Project , Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures, Representing Landscapes: Visualizing Climate Action by Nadia Amoroso, and Atlas of Green Energy Transitions: Power, Conflict, and Possibilities. His public scholarship has been published or cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, FastCo, National Geographic, Dwell, Rolling Stone, Wired, and Dissent, among others.
Billy regularly brings this work into his studios with students. There, they have developed new design research around the plantation-to-prison pipeline in the Mississippi Delta; the coalfield-to-prison pipeline in Appalachia; the Indigenous anti-extraction movements in South Greenland's resource frontier; and the ongoing struggles for sovereignty and energy democracy among First Nations in British Columbia. His students have won two Awards of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects for this work.
Prior to joining the Tyler School, Fleming co-founded and served as the Founding Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he developed and led a range of major initiatives, including the Green New Deal Superstudio, a major endowment campaign to support pathbreaking faculty research and graduate student assistantships, and created the McHarg Fellowship to support early career design scholars. He grew up in Arkansas and now resides in South Philly.