Urban Morphology and Climate Inequality

1.Climate risk has an urban morphology

Climate change is global. Exposure is local.

A temperature anomaly may affect an entire metropolitan region, yet its consequences differ substantially from one neighborhood to another. The same extreme rainfall event may produce limited disruption in one area and severe flooding several kilometers away. A regional drought can affect every household, but its consequences differ according to water infrastructure, storage capacity, housing quality and household income.

These differences are frequently described as differences in vulnerability. That is correct, but incomplete.

The physical structure of the city helps determine where climatic hazards are amplified, how people encounter them and what protective infrastructure exists between hazard and population.

Consider heat. A neighborhood characterized by mature tree canopy, permeable soil, shaded streets and lower thermal storage behaves differently from one dominated by asphalt, dark roofs, large parking surfaces and limited vegetation.

Consider rainfall. A watershed containing permeable surfaces, functional drainage and protected retention areas behaves differently from one in which urbanization has sealed soils, occupied flood pathways and overloaded downstream infrastructure.

The IPCC explicitly identifies urban morphology and built form as determinants of climate exposure. It notes that streets, buildings, impervious surfaces, ecological infrastructure and development location affect heat, precipitation, flooding and other climatic processes, while rapid urbanization can generate new vulnerability where expansion occurs in environmentally unsuitable areas.

The city should therefore be understood not simply as the location where climate change occurs. It is an active mediator of climate risk.

2.Urban morphology and social structure must be analyzed together

Urban morphology refers to the physical organization of urban space. At different scales it includes building density and height, street orientation, block dimensions, parcel structure, land-use distribution, impervious surfaces, green and blue infrastructure, transport networks, topography, settlement continuity, and the spatial relationship between developed and undeveloped land.

Climate inequality enters when that morphology is combined with social sorting.

Housing is not distributed randomly. Neither are income, tenure, age, employment, education, disability or household wealth.

Higher-income households may purchase access to neighborhoods with greater environmental quality, better drainage, more mature vegetation or stronger infrastructure. Lower-income households may face narrower residential choices, including peripheral areas with weaker services, environmentally fragile land, informal development or locations distant from employment and infrastructure.

The relationship is not universal and should not be presumed for every city. But when these processes overlap, urban morphology becomes one of the mechanisms through which socioeconomic inequality is translated into differential environmental exposure.

This is the essential analytical move. Climate inequality should not be studied as climate hazard + poverty. It should be studied as a chain:

3.Hazard, exposure and vulnerability are different variables

A rigorous framework requires conceptual separation.

A hazard is a potentially damaging climatic or environmental phenomenon: extreme heat, intense rainfall, drought, wildfire, a landslide-triggering storm.

Exposure describes the people, assets or activities located where that hazard occurs.

Vulnerability describes susceptibility to damage once exposed.

Adaptive capacity describes the ability to anticipate, reduce, absorb or recover from that damage.

These variables interact, but they are not interchangeable.

A high-income household and a low-income household can experience the same outdoor temperature yet face different risks because housing quality, access to cooling, financial reserves and health conditions differ. Conversely, two socioeconomically similar households can face different risk because one is located in a floodplain and the other is not.

The distinction matters because policy instruments differ. Hazard can sometimes be reduced through green infrastructure, drainage or urban design. Exposure can be reduced through land-use planning. Vulnerability can be reduced through housing, public health and social policy. Adaptive capacity can be increased through infrastructure, income protection, warning systems and public services.

An analytically useful representation is therefore:

The function should not be treated as a universal multiplicative equation. Its purpose is conceptual: climate risk emerges from interaction, not from a single variable.

4.Metropolitan form redistributes heat

The thermal behavior of the city offers perhaps the clearest illustration.

Urban surfaces absorb and release energy differently from vegetated terrain. Street width influences solar exposure. Building height modifies shading and ventilation. Surface materials affect albedo, thermal storage and radiative exchange. Tree canopy intercepts solar radiation and supports evapotranspiration. Impervious surfaces reduce moisture availability. Building geometry alters both daytime heating and nighttime cooling.

Consequently, two neighborhoods under the same synoptic weather can experience different thermal environments.

Recent studies increasingly combine socioeconomic conditions with building morphology precisely because neither dimension independently explains intra-urban heat inequality. Research published in 2025, for example, found that different combinations of density and building form produced distinct thermal environments and that housing-market and socioeconomic differences could intensify unequal heat exposure.

The important implication is that “density” alone is not a sufficient climate variable. A dense neighborhood with mature canopy, narrow shaded streets and mixed-use buildings may perform differently from a dense but highly impervious low-rise environment.

5.Metropolitan form also redistributes flood risk

Heat receives considerable attention because satellite imagery makes thermal inequality relatively visible. Flood risk demonstrates the same structural logic.

Urbanization modifies the hydrological response of a watershed. Vegetated or undeveloped land can intercept, infiltrate and temporarily store rainfall. Impervious development converts more precipitation into rapid surface runoff. Roads can become channels. Underpasses become retention points. Buildings obstruct or redirect flows. Drainage capacity determines whether runoff is safely conveyed. Development in natural depressions or historical flood pathways increases exposure independently of rainfall intensity.

The IPCC notes that increased building and road density expands impervious surfaces and that these conditions interact with heavy precipitation to increase urban flood risk.

The Guadalajara Metropolitan Risk Atlas reaches the same conclusion locally. It identifies reduced infiltration capacity, urbanization and extreme precipitation as interacting drivers and recommends restoring hydrological regulation through permeable soils, parks, gardens, bioretention and other forms of green infrastructure.

Flood inequality therefore also has a morphological component. The relevant question is not merely where does it rain most? It is:

6.Climate exposure is partly produced by land markets

Cities allocate environmental quality through land markets. Safer, well-connected, environmentally attractive locations frequently command higher prices.

That creates an important feedback. Environmental amenities become capitalized into land value. Households with greater purchasing power gain greater capacity to select into lower-risk or better-served environments. Households with constrained budgets may be pushed toward locations where land is cheaper precisely because accessibility, infrastructure, environmental quality or formal tenure are weaker.

This does not mean that wealthy households never occupy high-risk locations. Waterfront development, hillside housing and luxury construction can create important exceptions. Nor does it mean that poverty mechanically causes environmental exposure.

The point is structural: housing markets allocate households across an environmental landscape that planning and infrastructure have already made unequal.

Climate inequality therefore cannot be separated from housing affordability.

7.Metropolitan expansion creates a climate geography

Peripheral growth is particularly consequential.

The AMG's territorial-planning framework identifies continued metropolitan expansion as a major problem. It notes that increasingly distant development promotes dispersed and discontinuous urbanization and is associated with unequal distribution of infrastructure, services and employment.

That pattern has several climate implications. Peripheral development can consume vegetated and permeable land. It can increase dependence on motorized travel. It may expand settlement into locations with different hydrological or wildfire characteristics. Infrastructure may arrive after residential occupation rather than before it. Households may experience longer journeys and greater outdoor exposure. Municipal service provision becomes more spatially expensive.

The climate consequence is therefore not only a larger urban footprint. It is a different distribution of adaptive infrastructure per resident.

8.The periphery is not intrinsically vulnerable

However, an important qualification is necessary. Peripheral location itself is not equivalent to climate vulnerability.

Well-planned peripheral development can include high-quality drainage, extensive tree cover, reliable water systems, efficient transit and strong public infrastructure. Likewise, central neighborhoods can suffer extreme heat, drainage failure and socioeconomic vulnerability.

The analytically relevant condition is not distance from the center. It is the relationship among location, morphology, infrastructure and socioeconomic position.

This distinction prevents environmental-justice analysis from becoming geographically deterministic. The objective is not to label “the periphery” as vulnerable. It is to identify the mechanisms through which specific forms of peripheralization can generate risk.

9.Socio-spatial segregation can become climate segregation

When socioeconomic groups concentrate geographically, differences in urban form can become group-level differences in climate exposure. This is a central mechanism of climate inequality.

Suppose lower-income households are disproportionately concentrated in neighborhoods with less mature vegetation, greater surface impermeability, poorer housing, weaker drainage, longer travel distances and fewer financial resources for adaptation.

None of these variables alone constitutes climate injustice. Together they can create cumulative climate disadvantage.

This cumulative dimension is important because climate hazards do not occur one at a time. A household may simultaneously experience high heat exposure, water insecurity, flood risk, poor air quality and high transport costs.

Climate inequality is therefore frequently multi-hazard. A narrow focus on a single hazard can underestimate the burden borne by disadvantaged neighborhoods.

10.Guadalajara provides evidence of historically produced flood risk

Recent research on Guadalajara illustrates why a historical perspective matters.

A 2026 study of recurrent flooding argues that flood risk in the city has emerged through long-term socio-spatial and institutional processes rather than isolated rainfall events. The authors identify successive phases of urbanization on unsuitable land, socio-spatial segregation and uneven infrastructure provision as factors through which exposure and vulnerability have been generated and reproduced.

This is an important conceptual shift. If recurring flooding were simply the consequence of unusually heavy rainfall, policy would concentrate primarily on emergency response and hydraulic infrastructure. If risk has been produced through urban development, then planning history becomes part of the causal explanation.

The question becomes: who urbanized where? Under what regulations? With what infrastructure? What happened upstream? What land was impermeabilized? Which populations inherited the resulting risk?

11.Guadalajara's own risk framework already recognizes social vulnerability

The metropolitan planning system has begun moving in this direction. The AMG Metropolitan Risk Atlas does not restrict itself to hazard mapping.

For heat, it explicitly identifies areas with greater potential impact on people by integrating climatic analysis with intrinsic and specific social vulnerability. It also maps physical and social vulnerability in relation to other metropolitan risks.

This is analytically significant. It recognizes that a heatwave cannot be represented adequately as a temperature surface alone.

A 40 °C exposure in an affluent neighborhood with high-quality housing and extensive adaptive resources does not have the same expected consequences as the same meteorological hazard in a population with older adults, poorer housing or limited access to cooling.

The next research step is to integrate this vulnerability analysis more directly with urban morphology itself.

12.Informality can represent a particular morphology of vulnerability

IMEPLAN has undertaken specific work on irregular settlements experiencing poverty in the AMG, examining how such settlements form and how they relate to the wider metropolis.

Informality matters for climate research not because informal settlement should automatically be equated with vulnerability. Rather, informality can alter the institutional pathways through which protection is delivered.

Drainage may be incomplete. Road geometry may complicate emergency access. Tenure insecurity may discourage household investment. Public infrastructure may lag population growth. Settlements may occupy land that remained undeveloped partly because of environmental constraints.

Households may also possess strong social networks and local adaptive knowledge that formal indicators fail to capture.

Climate analysis therefore requires both physical and institutional dimensions. The morphology of a settlement interacts with its relationship to the State.

13.Mobility creates another geography of climate exposure

Residential location is only one component of exposure. People move.

The AMG contains approximately 5.24 million inhabitants, and the 2023 origin-destination survey reported about 11.8 million trips per day. Forty-three percent of metropolitan trips are made on foot, while women walk proportionally more and many of those trips are associated with household and care activities.

This has implications for climate inequality. A person's residential neighborhood may be relatively cool, while their daily route exposes them to unshaded sidewalks, large intersections, impervious transport corridors, long waits at transit stops, or heat-intensive employment locations.

A purely residential analysis can therefore misclassify actual exposure. The relevant unit is increasingly a daily activity space, not simply a census tract.

14.Morphology changes who can avoid exposure

Mobility also reveals another aspect of adaptive capacity.

A household with a private air-conditioned vehicle can traverse the same city differently from a person who walks twenty minutes to a bus stop. A remote worker can avoid midday heat differently from a street vendor. A resident of a well-insulated dwelling can recover from daytime exposure differently from someone whose home remains hot overnight.

Urban morphology shapes exposure. Socioeconomic position shapes the capacity to avoid that exposure.

This suggests three analytically distinct mechanisms:

1. —exposure production — where hazardous environments are located
2. —exposure allocation — which groups live and move through them
3. —exposure avoidance — who has resources to reduce contact with them

Climate inequality emerges from all three.

15.Infrastructure can either interrupt or amplify the relationship

Infrastructure functions as an intermediary between climate and society.

Drainage interrupts the pathway from heavy rainfall to flooding. Tree canopy and shade interrupt solar radiation before it becomes human heat load. Reliable water systems interrupt drought before it becomes household water insecurity. Cooling centers and health systems interrupt heat exposure before it becomes mortality.

But infrastructure is itself geographically distributed. This creates a critical concept: protective infrastructure inequality.

Two neighborhoods may experience identical hazards but possess different quantities of public protection.

Environmental inequality therefore involves both unequal exposure to hazards and unequal access to the infrastructure that reduces their consequences.

16.Urban density should not be treated as a climate pathology

Discussions of urban morphology often reduce the problem to density. This is analytically inadequate.

Density can generate thermal challenges, particularly where high built volume coincides with low vegetation, poor ventilation and high heat storage. But lower-density expansion can create other climate burdens: greater land consumption, longer infrastructure networks, more impervious development, higher transport demand, loss of ecological land and reduced accessibility.

The climate performance of density depends on configuration — building height, street width, orientation, ventilation, tree canopy, land-use mix, surface permeability and open-space structure.

Recent systematic reviews show that morphology operates through combinations of parameters rather than a simple linear relationship between density and environmental performance.

The relevant planning question is therefore not how dense should a climate-resilient city be? It is:

17.Climate inequality can be locked into the city for decades

Buildings, streets and infrastructure have long lifetimes.

A street orientation chosen today may persist for a century. A subdivision can establish parcel geometry that becomes extraordinarily expensive to modify. A buried drainage system may remain in service for decades. A peripheral development can shape travel behavior and infrastructure obligations for generations.

This creates morphological lock-in.

Climate policy is therefore unusually sensitive to planning decisions made before the full consequences of climate change are visible.

The IPCC explicitly warns that built-environment adaptations and development decisions can generate long-lived path dependencies and that poorly designed adaptation can produce adverse equity effects.

18.Adaptation itself can reproduce inequality

Climate adaptation is not automatically equitable.

Consider tree planting. If investment is directed primarily toward neighborhoods where planting is easiest — wide sidewalks, existing irrigation, stronger maintenance and high-quality public space — already advantaged populations may receive a disproportionate share of new cooling benefits.

Consider flood defenses. Protecting high-value property may generate strong benefit-cost ratios while leaving lower-value residential areas less protected.

Consider green redevelopment. New parks and environmental improvements can increase land values and potentially contribute to displacement.

The emerging environmental-justice literature therefore distinguishes between at least three dimensions:

1. —distributional justice — who receives benefits and burdens
2. —procedural justice — who participates in deciding
3. —recognitional justice — whose needs, experiences and vulnerabilities are acknowledged

Systematic reviews published in 2025 conclude that climate-resilience strategies increasingly need to integrate these multiple dimensions rather than treating equity solely as the spatial distribution of projects.

19.The adaptation paradox

This creates a difficult policy problem.

Suppose a municipality successfully cools a highly vulnerable neighborhood by adding trees, parks and public space. The intervention improves environmental quality. Property values increase. Higher-income households become more willing to move into the area. Rents rise. Some original residents leave.

A project can therefore improve the climate performance of a place while failing to improve the long-term climate security of the original population. This is sometimes discussed under the broader concepts of green gentrification or climate gentrification.

The lesson is not to avoid environmental investment in disadvantaged neighborhoods. That would reproduce the initial injustice.

The lesson is that adaptation policy and housing policy must be coordinated. Climate protection attached only to territory can move away from vulnerable people if vulnerable people are displaced from that territory.

20.Measuring climate inequality requires more than overlay maps

A common methodology is straightforward: map heat, map poverty, overlay both, identify hotspots.

This is useful as an initial diagnostic. It is not enough for a high-quality causal analysis. Several methodological problems arise.

1. 1.spatial autocorrelation — neighboring observations are not independent
2. 2.the modifiable areal unit problem — relationships change with the chosen geography
3. 3.socioeconomic and environmental data frequently operate at different resolutions
4. 4.residential exposure may differ from daily mobility exposure
5. 5.cross-sectional associations do not demonstrate causality

Recent methodological reviews of urban heat inequality emphasize precisely these problems, including heavy reliance on land-surface temperature, census aggregation and cross-scale data translation.

A rigorous research agenda needs to go substantially further.

21.A metropolitan research design

For the AMG, one could construct a Metropolitan Climate Morphology Observatory based on a common spatial grid, potentially at 100 × 100 meters or another resolution justified by data quality.

Each cell could contain several analytical layers.

Urban morphology

1. —building coverage ratio and floor-area ratio
2. —building height
3. —street width and intersection density
4. —block dimensions
5. —Sky View Factor
6. —impervious surface percentage
7. —tree canopy and vegetation indices
8. —distance to blue-green infrastructure
9. —slope and elevation

Climate hazard

1. —daytime and nighttime land-surface temperature
2. —near-surface air temperature where sensors exist
3. —extreme heat duration
4. —rainfall intensity and modeled runoff
5. —flood depth and velocity
6. —wildfire exposure
7. —water-stress indicators

Social structure

1. —income and educational attainment
2. —age and disability
3. —housing tenure, overcrowding and materials
4. —employment type
5. —access to cooling
6. —vehicle ownership
7. —social deprivation

Protective infrastructure

1. —drainage capacity
2. —tree canopy and public parks
3. —cooling facilities and health services
4. —transit access
5. —water continuity
6. —emergency accessibility

The analytical object would then be the interaction among these layers.

22.From correlation to causal inference

A sophisticated project should attempt to identify how urban form produces differences in exposure, not merely where variables coincide.

Several methods could be combined. Spatial regression could address geographic dependence. Multilevel models could separate household, neighborhood and municipal effects. Panel data could identify how exposure changes as neighborhoods urbanize. Difference-in-differences designs could estimate the effects of interventions such as new parks or drainage projects.

Remote sensing could reconstruct land-cover change over several decades. Historical planning documents could identify when and why particular urban forms emerged. Flood-event data could reveal whether infrastructure investment changes damage outcomes. Qualitative work could identify adaptive practices invisible in administrative data.

The most convincing study would therefore combine climate science, spatial econometrics, planning history and social research.

23.Local Climate Zones offer one useful morphology framework

One promising approach is the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) system. Instead of dividing urban territory solely by administrative boundaries, LCZs classify areas according to physical characteristics such as building height, density, surface cover and vegetation.

This allows researchers to compare thermal behavior among physically distinct urban forms.

A 2025 systematic review covering 126 studies found increasing use of LCZ mapping as a tool for urban heat analysis and climate-resilience planning, while also noting that accuracy depends strongly on underlying spatial data.

For the AMG, LCZ classification could be combined with socioeconomic data. That would make it possible to ask which social groups are overrepresented in the warmest morphological types, which morphology contains the greatest concentration of vulnerable older adults, and which LCZs combine low canopy, high imperviousness and low household adaptive capacity.

This moves analysis from “poor neighborhood versus rich neighborhood” toward a more physically explicit mechanism.

24.A Climate Morphology Inequality Index

A research project could also develop a composite index, although it should be constructed cautiously. Conceptually, an index might combine four dimensions.

M — Morphological amplification. How strongly does the built form amplify the relevant hazard?

E — Exposure. How many people and activities are located within the hazard footprint?

V — Social vulnerability. How susceptible are exposed populations to harm?

A — Adaptive protection. How much public and private capacity exists to reduce that harm?

A generalized index could be represented as:

The function should not simply assign arbitrary equal weights. Weights could instead be derived from epidemiological evidence, expert elicitation, statistical models, sensitivity testing and participatory processes.

The objective would not be to produce a simplistic league table of neighborhoods. It would be to identify different mechanisms of climate disadvantage.

One neighborhood may rank highly because of extreme hazard. Another because of social vulnerability. Another because protective infrastructure is unusually weak. Those differences imply different interventions.

25.Inequality should also be measured as a distribution

A second methodological improvement is to move beyond hotspot identification.

Suppose average urban heat exposure decreases. That does not reveal whether inequality decreased. The benefits may have accrued entirely to neighborhoods that were already relatively protected.

Climate adaptation should therefore be evaluated using distributional measures: differences between income quintiles, population-weighted exposure, concentration curves, Gini-type environmental inequality measures, between-group and within-group variance, or changes in the exposure gap between the most and least vulnerable populations.

The policy question becomes:

Those are different outcomes.

26.Metropolitan planning should include climate-distributional impact

The research has a direct institutional implication. Major planning decisions could be subjected to a Climate Distributional Impact Assessment.

Before approving significant urban expansion, transport infrastructure or land-use change, authorities could estimate:

1. 1.change in impervious surface
2. 2.change in canopy cover
3. 3.change in runoff
4. 4.change in thermal morphology
5. 5.population newly exposed
6. 6.social composition of affected areas
7. 7.infrastructure requirements
8. 8.distribution of benefits and burdens

This would complement conventional environmental-impact assessment. The key difference would be explicit attention to who receives the resulting climate risk.

A project that slightly improves metropolitan averages while concentrating additional exposure in an already vulnerable population should not be considered equivalent to one producing the same aggregate outcome without that distributional cost.

27.Climate policy and housing policy cannot remain separate

If residential sorting shapes environmental exposure, climate adaptation cannot be separated from housing.

Affordable housing policy affects where lower-income households can live. Land-use regulation affects supply. Infrastructure investment affects land value. Transport affects accessibility. Climate adaptation affects environmental quality. These systems interact.

A city that concentrates affordable housing in poorly connected, highly impervious peripheral locations may reproduce climate inequality even while complying with formal housing targets. Conversely, inclusionary housing in well-served and environmentally protected areas can function indirectly as climate adaptation.

28.The AMG already possesses many of the components needed for this analysis

The metropolitan region has an unusually strong foundation for a project of this kind. IMEPLAN and the State maintain a Metropolitan Risk Atlas, a Metropolitan Climate Action Plan, a Metropolitan Territorial Plan, mobility origin-destination information, studies of irregular settlements in poverty, ecological connectivity information, water-resilience analysis and open metropolitan geographic platforms.

The Metropolitan Risk Atlas already contains physical and social vulnerability mapping and identifies heat, flood and wildfire risks. The POTmet recognizes dispersed metropolitan expansion and unequal distribution of infrastructure, services and employment. The metropolitan resilience framework identifies irregular settlements, mobility problems, floods, drought and fires among the chronic stresses and acute shocks affecting the region.

The analytical opportunity is therefore not to invent an entirely new information ecosystem. It is to integrate these existing systems around a new question:

29.From climate vulnerability to climate production

Most climate-vulnerability research begins with existing risk. Where are vulnerable people? Where are the hot areas? Where are the floods?

A deeper urban perspective asks how those geographies came into existence.

Why is this neighborhood impervious? Why was this watershed urbanized? Why is tree canopy lower here? Why are housing prices lower in this location? Why did drainage investment arrive earlier elsewhere? Why are lower-income households concentrated at this distance from employment? Why was formal development constrained while irregular development continued?

These are questions about the production of urban space.

Climate inequality is therefore not only a condition to be mapped. It is a process to be reconstructed.

30.The normative implication: equal climate does not require equal infrastructure

An equity-oriented approach should not imply identical investment everywhere.

Different places face different baseline hazards. Different populations possess different vulnerabilities. Equal spending can therefore preserve unequal protection.

The relevant objective is closer to equivalent substantive protection.

A neighborhood with extreme flood exposure may rationally require greater drainage investment per capita. A neighborhood with large elderly populations and little private cooling may require greater heat-adaptation investment. A peripheral area with weak public transport may require stronger mobility infrastructure.

This can be expressed conceptually as:

Again, this is not a universal quantitative formula. It is a normative principle. Investment should be responsive to differences in risk, not blind to them.

31.Climate-resilient morphology should become a planning objective

Urban planning traditionally regulates height, density, land use, setbacks, parking, street dimensions and building envelopes.

Climate change suggests adding another performance dimension: what climate environment does this morphology produce?

Development standards could increasingly consider minimum effective canopy, maximum impervious cover, runoff performance, solar exposure, shading, street ventilation, thermal properties, water demand and access to protective infrastructure.

This would move adaptation upstream. Rather than mitigating climate exposure after construction, the city would regulate the production of exposure itself.

Conclusion

Climate change does not encounter a socially neutral city. It encounters a metropolis already differentiated by land value, housing markets, infrastructure, ecological quality, transportation, political investment and social inequality.

Urban morphology gives those differences physical form.

A rainfall event encounters some soils that can infiltrate water and others that cannot. Solar radiation encounters some streets protected by mature canopy and others dominated by exposed asphalt. Drought encounters some households with storage and redundancy and others with little capacity to absorb interruption. Extreme heat encounters some workers indoors and others outside.

The meteorological event may be regional. The resulting risk is profoundly local.

This is why urban morphology must be treated as part of the causal architecture of climate inequality.

The IPCC's conclusion is unequivocal: the form, planning and maintenance of settlements determine patterns of exposure, vulnerability and resilience, while marginalized populations face disproportionate climate impacts.

In Guadalajara, the local evidence points in the same direction. Metropolitan expansion has produced increasingly distant and discontinuous development alongside unequal access to services and employment. The metropolitan risk framework identifies growing flood hazards and explicitly combines climatic risk with social vulnerability. Recent research further suggests that recurrent flooding must be interpreted through the history of urbanization, socio-spatial segregation and uneven infrastructure rather than as a sequence of isolated storms.

The analytical conclusion is therefore stronger than the proposition that “poor communities are more vulnerable to climate change.” That statement describes an outcome. The more important research question concerns the mechanism:

Answering that question changes the role of planning. Climate adaptation can no longer be understood solely as constructing defenses against future climatic events. It also requires examining the city that already exists — and the city currently being authorized — and asking whether its physical form systematically allocates protection to some populations and risk to others.

A climate-just metropolis is therefore not one in which every neighborhood has identical environmental conditions. That would be physically impossible.

It is one in which socioeconomic position does not systematically determine how much climatic hazard a person must absorb, how much public protection surrounds them, or how many private resources they must purchase simply to achieve the level of safety that other parts of the city receive through their urban form.

Climate inequality is visible during the heatwave and the flood. But much of it is produced years earlier: when land is zoned; when housing is located; when a watershed is paved; when a street is designed; when a park is preserved; when drainage is financed; when infrastructure is deferred; and when metropolitan expansion determines who will live where.