Canicule. Chicago, été 1995 : Autopsie sociale d’une catastrophe by Eric Klinenberg

On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans woke up to a scorching day in which temperatures reached 41 degrees Celsius. The heatwave would extend well beyond the two days initially predicted by meteorologists. Over the next week, more than seven hundred people died. The great Chicago heat wave was one of the deadliest in American history. Eric Klinenberg undertakes a “social autopsy” of a metropolis, examining the social, political and institutional organs of the city. He examines the reasons for the marked excess mortality in certain neighbourhoods, looks at how the city responded to the crisis and how journalists, scientists and officials reported and explained the events.

Bureau 205 designed and produced this book as part of the collection “À partir de l’Anthropocène” developed jointly by Éditions deux-cent-cinq and the École urbaine de Lyon.
The form and format stem from the editorial principle established at the start of this collaboration, which aims to “reinvent” the way of publishing in the Anthropocene era: optimisation of resources through a format adapted to the size of the paper and machines, printing in France by service providers who are themselves concerned about reducing their environmental impact, reduction of transport, etc.

Over the course of the pages, without the reader noticing, the colour slowly changes from orange to bright red, as if to reflect the – inexorable – rise in temperatures over the coming years.

The typefaces used are Thelo Micro, designed by Tassiana Nunez-Costa, for its high legibility and strong typographic grey, and Plaax, designed by Damien Gautier, used for titles in narrow capitals, headings and footnotes, both distributed by 205TF.