Temple University

Billy Fleming is an interdisciplinary scholar of climate justice and the built environment and founding co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think-tank focused on climate and political economy. His research focuses on clean energy supply chains, social and abolitionist movements in rural landscapes, land-based practices of carbon management, and the communities transformed by each.

He is the author of the forthcoming book, Building Postcarbon Futures: Imagining and Enacting Climate Justice (Lincoln, 2025), which explores these issues, and has co-edited and published writings in Design With Nature Now (Lincoln, 2019), A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation (Island Press, 2021), the Journal of Architectural Education, Social Text, Log, LA+, Landscape Journal, and Places Journal; Dissent Magazine, Jacobin, The Guardian, and Bloomberg CityLab; Technical Lands: A Critical Primer by Jeffrey Nesbit and Charles Waldheim, The Landscape Project by Richard Weller and Tatum Hands, Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures by Rosalea Monacella and Bridget Keane, Representing Landscapes: Visualizing Climate Action by Nadia Amoroso; and the digital humanities projects An Atlas for the Green New Deal and Field Notes Toward an Internationalist Green New Deal.

He also co-led the creation of Data Refuge—an international consortium of scientists, programmers, archivists, librarians, and activists dedicated to securing critical environmental data at the risk of erasure during the first Trump Administration—and co-founded Indivisible—a progressive organizing non-profit with chapters in every congressional district in the United States.

Prior to joining the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Fleming 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 research initiatives, including the Green New Deal Superstudio, the development of new resources for faculty-led research groups, including the EMLab (led by Sean Burkholder, Keith Vandersys, and Karen M’Closkey); the hiring of more than 100 graduate student research assistants to grow the department’s capacity for new pathbreaking scholarship, and the development of major new public programs, including the multi-day “Designing a Green New Deal” event that brought more than 1,500 people—the single largest climate event in the university’s history. While there, Fleming’s advanced interdisciplinary studios won national ASLA awards for their work around climate justice in the United States and Greenland.

Fleming has been cited for his research in The New York Times Magazine, Dwell Magazine, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, Curbed, and The New Yorker, among many others. He serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Architectural Education, the advisory board for the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the board of the United States chapter of Architects Declare, and as an external examiner for the Architectural Association in London. He has delivered more than 100 invited lectures on four continents and has served as a guest juror for prestigious prizes like the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Awards program, the Steedman Fellowship at the Washington University of Saint Louis, and the Best Paper awards for the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

PhD, Urban Planning, University of Pennsylvania
MCRP, City and Regional Planning, University of Texas at Austin
BLA, Landscape Architecture, University of Arkansas

You can follow his work on Bluesky @joobilly.bsky.social.