According to Riverside County statistics, 66 people died due to heat-related illnesses in 2024—up from 34 in 2023, 49 in 2022, and 63 in 2021. In 2024 alone, there were 1,627 recorded emergency-department visits in the county due to heat-related illnesses.
Christian Rodriguez Ceja is a community principal at the Coachella office of the Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), a nonprofit with expertise in “partnering with people in under-resourced communities to build healthier, more connected neighborhoods and cities.” He said the story of heat-related illnesses goes well beyond these statistics.
“There are farmworkers in the eastern Coachella Valley who go off to work in the summer mornings and work under these very hot conditions, and their bodies are not able to regulate the heat. And then they return to a home that might not be well-insulated and might not have proper cooling equipment. So again, they’re unable to regulate their body temperature. What we know, and what the science tells us, is that when you can’t regulate your body heat, it does some really nasty things to your body.”
The team at KDI obtained $644,411 in funding at the start of 2024, thanks to a grant from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (now called the Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation). The money was designated to support a community outreach effort and a heat-impact study as the first steps toward the creation of an Eastern Coachella Valley Shade Equity Master Plan.
KDI partnered with UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation, the Riverside University Health System (RUHS) and local community members with the Oasis Leadership Committee (OLC), with the goal of improving the quality of life for low-income farmworkers and their families in the eastern Coachella Valley. The master plan will provide a roadmap for the creation of much-needed shaded public spaces, primarily in and around the unincorporated communities of North Shore, Mecca, Oasis and Thermal. The remediation strategies under consideration include utilizing natural means such as planting trees, and the construction of shade structures at various spots where residents congregate.
“We’re not trying to shade conditions for 120 degrees,” Christian Rodriguez Ceja said. “That would be ridiculous. There’s a point where it’s really just unhealthy for people to be outdoors in extreme heat, but (these shaded areas) are intended to be havens to escape the harsh conditions of our desert.”
The need for shade is only intensifying as temperatures continue to rise. According to the website for the California Climate Change Assessment, Inland Deserts Region, “The inland deserts region in Southern California is getting hotter because of climate change. Heatwaves happen more often, and the temperatures during the day and night are getting higher. … Now, the area regularly has more than 100 days each year with temperatures above 100°F, and there are about two extra weeks each summer when it’s over 110°F compared to years ago. Nights aren’t cooling down as much, either, making it harder for people to stay comfortable. … The Coachella Valley will keep getting hotter because of climate change. By around 2050, summers there might be 6 to 10 degrees hotter than they used to be. By the end of the century, temperatures could be 8 to 14 degrees hotter if pollution continues. This means that a summer day that’s usually around 110°F could feel as hot as 118 to 120°F. All this extra heat means more health risks for people living there.”
KDI’s Coachella office is one of four that the architectural design firm has established globally; the others are in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Sweden and Nairobi, Kenya. Founded in 2006 by six students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, KDI has helps design, facilitate and organize input in disadvantaged communities for a variety of climate-related projects.
“KDI is a is a nonprofit design and urban planning firm,” Rodriguez Ceja said. “We are mission-driven, and we do work in communities of color, low-income communities, disadvantaged communities. Our goal is to use the discipline of urban planning and urban design to support … creating healthier communities. So when we started talking with residents around North Shore, shade was a big priority.”
KDI has been involved in various east valley projects since the early 2010s. An Aug. 29, 2024, article in the Landscape Architecture Magazine reported that one of KDI’s earliest successful projects was at “St. Anthony’s Trailer Park (which) opened in 2013 along Highway 111 near Mecca. Created in partnership with the Pueblo Unido Community Development Corporation, it followed the highly participatory process that the team used in Kenya: research, workshops and listening. Residents were asked to envision and codesign a place that reflected their basic needs while allowing for cultural dreaming. The result is what KDI calls a ‘Productive Public Space’ and includes a wooden stage for performances and play, raised beds for growing fruit and vegetables, and a shade structure. A similar call and response shaped a more recent project, Oasis del Desierto Park. The first phase opened in 2021 and includes a soccer field, a playground, and restrooms. Located across the street from a trailer park in Oasis, it serves the farmworkers and their families who live there.”
From 2016-2021, KDI drove the creation of the Somos Oasis 14-acre productive public park, which combines exercise and recreational facilities with carefully designed planting and green infrastructure. That experience formed the foundation of an expanding relationship with the aforementioned Oasis Leadership Committee (OLC), a group of “residents who were very much involved in the regional planning and were interested in having us help them become a more formalized advocacy group,” Rodriguez Ceja said.
The shade structure project is, in part, the result of KDI’s work with other organizations on a mobility/transportation plan for Riverside County.
“We started engaging residents around the types of active transportation needs, and challenges with public transit,” Rodriguez Ceja said. “… SunLine (Transit Agency), which was very involved in the conversations and a consistent stakeholder throughout all of the engagement during the mobility planning for the eastern Coachella Valley, was very interested in exploring what a response to these communities could be. … As we were designing this with the OLC, they started asking, ‘What about shade everywhere else? We like the idea of providing shade for bus stops and bus shelters, but we’re hot everywhere else. We’re hot at work; we’re hot at school; we’re hot at our parks; we’re hot at home. Is there anything that can be done about shade (in those environments)?’ … That is really how the idea for a shade master plan came about.”
In 2019, KDI began partnering with the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation to conduct a heat-impact study in Oasis.
“In 2019, we hired the OLC to be brought on as an engagement partner,” Rodriguez Ceja said. “They supported the data collection that was going on in Oasis with Arizona State University and UCLA, by putting up heat sensors, both outside and inside homes, and (by taking) out the medium-rated temperature monitoring robot called ‘Marty.’ This was the first time we started really diving into the current conditions of heat, extreme heat, medium radiant temperature and thermal comfort for this community.”
This, in 2022, led to the installation of a new bus-stop shade-structure prototype in Oasis—yet another precursor to the Coachella Valley Shade Equity Master Plan.
“We wanted to understand what that threshold of thermal comfort is in the eastern Coachella Valley. What are the types of activities that people are performing, and where are they performing these?”
Christian Rodriguez Ceja, community principal at the Kounkuey Design Initiative
“From my understanding, this would be the first rural shade plan,” Rodriguez Ceja said. “Most of the work that we’ve been reviewing is centered around more dense urban areas. Initially, we set out to make sure that we were asking the right questions as part of our guiding engagement. In order to do that we worked directly with the Oasis Leadership Committee.”
Work on the plan is continuing as the calendar turns from 2025 to 2026.
“What we have been doing with the community engagement process is understanding … people’s thermal comfort,” Rodriguez Ceja said. “Our threshold is different at different ages, and (within) different demographics. … We wanted to understand what that threshold of thermal comfort is in the eastern Coachella Valley. What are the types of activities that people are performing, and where are they performing these? Then, how can a plan maximize use of these sites? So we’ve taken different sites throughout the entire eastern Coachella Valley, including Mecca, North Shore, Oasis and Thermal, and we’ve done these analyses, and at this point, we’re developing recommendations.”
Barring any delays, by the end of 2026—after the finished plan has been shared with and commented upon by the OLC, community members and other stakeholders—KDI will present the Coachella Valley Shade Equity Master Plan to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors for final approval. Then, construction of the initial phase of these shade structures and/or tree plantings will get under way.
“We’ve been in ongoing conversations with folks at the Desert Recreation District, folks at the county’s planning department, at SunLine Transit … and at CVUSD (Coachella Valley Unified School District),” Rodriguez Ceja said. “We’ve talked to a lot of different agencies and special districts who ultimately would inherit this (plan), and be asked to help with the implementation. Part of what we’re doing through this process is identifying funding mechanisms and sources for these types of projects, and how they can be integrated into things that already are happening. For example, we spoke to CVUSD and discovered they’re about to publish their facilities master plan. In that conversation, we said, ‘How wonderful would it be if we could integrate some of these recommendations?’ … We’re finding synergies across many of the conversations we’re having with the various agencies, departments and districts.”