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.

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’s Weitzman School of Design. 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.