As climate disasters intensify, visualisation plays a critical role in shaping what societies recognise as vulnerable, valuable, and worth protecting. Yet disaster maps often privilege physical and economic loss — acres burned, properties damaged, recovery costs, and infrastructure disrupted — while overlooking the cultural heritage sites through which communities hold memory, identity, spirituality, and belonging.
What the Fire Takes is a data visualisation and geospatial analysis project that examines this missing layer through wildfire risk in California. Anchored in the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, which together destroyed more than 16,000 structures, the project uses open-source cultural heritage data and California's Fire Hazard Severity Zones to map where places of worship, museums, historic sites, and other community anchors are at risk.
Combining spatial analysis with narrative storytelling, the visualisation argues, through design, that wildfire must be understood not only as a natural disaster but as a slow erasure of cultural infrastructure.
This talk will share the design process behind the project, including the challenges of working with incomplete heritage inventories, translating geospatial analysis into public-facing visual narratives, and designing for both emotional resonance and decision-making.
Rather than treating cultural heritage as secondary to climate resilience, the project positions heritage as part of the social infrastructure of adaptation. By making cultural risk legible before disaster strikes, What the Fire Takes offers a case study in how climate visualisation can move from reactive documentation of loss toward proactive, plural, and community-centred resilience planning.