Angie Oberg
Chief Climate Officer
Rutgers University, Office of Climate Action
Biography
Angela Oberg is the Chief Climate Officer at Rutgers University, where she directs the Office of Climate Action. She brings together the diverse knowledge, experiences, and passions of Rutgers' many stakeholders in service of their shared climate goals. Angie is an urban environmental planner working to make communities more livable and sustainable by integrating academic rigor with practical strategy and systems thinking. Her scholarly work investigates how the everyday lives of urban residents shape, and are shaped by, urban political ecologies. In particular, her scholarly work focuses on the urban political ecology of sewage.
Before transitioning to the higher education sector, Angie practiced professionally as an environmental planner in California, Texas, and Pennsylvania on projects in the United States, Italy, United Arab Emirates, and Sudan. She holds a Ph.D. in planning and public policy from the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers and a Master of Landscape Architecture from Cal Poly Pomona.
Rutgers Climate Bridge Panel1: Impact on People
Moderator
Rutgers Climate Bridge Panel 7: Vision for People
Abstract
Recently, the United States Congress has been debating large spending bills, which include a raft of measures to expand the social safety net. This has led to fierce public debates around what counts as infrastructure. In this talk, I suggest such framing misses the point entirely by turning away from the discourse of service delivery to place infrastructure at the center of debate. I use examples of sewage in urban India to argue that a myopic focus on infrastructure has led to tremendous investment of resources and leaves services undelivered. Renewed attention to the goal of service delivery forces planners, policy makers, and advocates to ask questions about people and not just hardware.