Sarah Bassett

Sarah M. Bassett is an Associate Clinical Professor in the School of Public Affairs, Co-Director of the Resilient Visions Co-Lab, and Director of Policy and Impact at the Center for Heat Preparedness at Arizona State University. She is also the co-founder of Peoples Culture, a New York City collective. She is an environmental planner working in risk and resilience, on why people take up, or resist, the risks they face, particularly from extreme weather and technological change. Her practice, built across nearly twenty years and three continents in the private and public sectors, gives the people most exposed a hand in shaping solutions, and carries that into plans, policies, and capital decisions. Sarah’s work has appeared in academic press and professional publication, in state and federal policy, in adopted plans and delivered infrastructure, and in simulations co-authored with communities, exhibited from local venues to museums and archives. She regularly works with communities, agencies, and firms from the neighborhood to the federal level, as well as internationally. Sarah also serves on the national board of the American Planning Association's Technology Division and is an active member of its Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Division.

Prior to ASU, Bassett held senior leadership roles at some of the largest planning firms in New York City and the U.S. Southeast, where she established new offices, built and expanded practice areas in risk, resilience, and environmental planning, and served in regional leadership roles partnering with states, cities, and communities. That practice spans climate adaptation, disaster recovery, green and nature-based infrastructure, multi-modal infrastructure, and long-range planning, with work recognized and published by the American Planning Association, the Federal Highway Administration, and the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. At Peoples Culture, Bassett uses narrative and spatial computing to surface the human dimensions of risk and unmet community need, translating those conditions into co-created works that drive policy change. That work is archived at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, featured in the New York Times and MIT's Co-Creation Studio, and has directly shaped policy in North Carolina and New York.