Heat resilience among mobile home owners in Arizona: towards a multi-scale approach to address spatial incongruence and accountable decision making.

Although only 5% of housing in Maricopa County, Arizona are mobile or manufactured homes, residents make up between 30 to 40% of indoor heat associated deaths each year. While our prior qualitative and quantitative research has been able to reveal multi-scale factors underlying these disparities, we find it challenging to move towards co-production of solutions with stakeholders. We recognize part of this problem is due to an unique analytical challenge emerging from the incongruence across spatial units and scales of the phenomena, relative to the scales of action of stakeholders, relative to the jurisdictions at which decisions to act upon this knowledge may be put into place. This article situates our ongoing research experiences through a multi-stakeholder effort to improve heat resilience among mobile home residents in Arizona. We compare jurisdictions, impacts, and accountability to identify and assess potential design solutions to the disproportionate heat risk. We introduce a set of piloted tools and a decision matrix that serves to frame solutions sets according to multiple scales of measured benefits, costs, needs and resources. This is then applied in depth to one of three stakeholder-identified categories in terms of natural and built environment solutions. We discuss and consider policy and regulatory solution sets. This article aims to articulate our experience with this distinct problem of mobilizing solutions, to offer a not only specific ideas for heat resilience, but also to propose an innovative methodological approach for developing possible collective action. In doing so, we further evolve the conceptual framework of how to understand the more general analytical challenge of addressing spatial incongruences. We urge scholars to consider innovating approaches that further our understanding of how to motivate use of co-produced knowledge for accountable decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]