Ways Humans are Cooling Down Cities

Taylor Schullo

Parajuli

Intro to Environmental & Sustainability

19 October 2022

Ways Humans are Cooling Down Cities

While cities across the world only use two percent of the earth’s available land, sixty percent of humans live in cities. This has caused several negative effects on our planet like pollution levels and high consumption of electricity but especially the Urban Heat Island Effect. The Urban Heat Island Effect is when the heat is built up in one area compared to the rural surroundings; London, for example, is six degrees celsius warmer than the surrounding areas. This heat is abundant because of absorption in the dark concrete and asphalt, lack of parks and greenery, and overall pollution.

One city has been designed to avoid this High Island Effect: Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates. This prototype city has been completely designed to have no cars and close together buildings to provide shade; as well, the “Wind Tower'' pulls down cool air to go throughout the city. The temperature is 15 degrees cooler than the dessert that it surrounds.

For cities that have already been built, urban planners have been using three tactics to cool down. First is to design and build buildings that need less energy to run, but humans are decades behind effectively putting this into place. Second, Las Angeles’ “Cool Pavement Pilot Project” is an example of how cities are now painting their roads, sidewalks, and other large areas of concrete and asphalt to start reflecting the sun’s heat. So far doing this in one third of Los Angeles has cooled the entire city down by one degree. Third, Chicago’s plan to add greenery to the top of their buildings has shown to reduce temperatures. When they did this at the Chicago City Hall, the roof temperature was twenty one degree celsius lower than neighboring buildings. The city has the Climate Action Plan that plans to have six thousand roofs covered in plants by 2030.

Overall, using all three of these methods is the best way to fight the climate crisis. While one plan only shows small relief, implementing them all can have a large effect on energy use, temperature reduction, and increase of plants in cities. Political ecology is the study of social dynamics between what is wrong and often how uneven and inequitable the landscapes are. The relationship between heat and income can be seen that in cooler areas the higher the income and vise versa, hotter the area the lower the income. This is an example of political ecology and how environmental justice goes hand in hand because of the environment inequality.

References 

TheB1MLtd. “3 Cool Ways to Cool Our Cities.” YouTube, YouTube, 19 Sept. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Y7VYVVD68.