Bart Orr is a PhD candidate in Public and Urban Policy at the New School.  His work brings together the fields of Political Ecology, Environmental Geography, Science and Technology Studies, and Urban Studies.  He focuses primarily on climate change and the politics of planning and designing resilient urban futures.

 

Bart's dissertation investigates social relations around the design and functionality of community solar micro-grids in San Juan, Puerto Rico. By understanding solar micro-grid projects in Puerto Rico as part of a larger experiment in producing resilient subjects as well as infrastructure, his work aims to situate current projects within the longer history of future-making on the island.

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While at the New School, Bart has been a member of the Urban Systems Lab as well as the Global Urban Futures project, where he co-authored several reports with Prof. Michael Cohen. His work has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx-SRN) and the Tishman Environment and Design Center. He has presented work at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting, Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE), and at Habitat III.  In 2021-2022, Bart was a Fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School.