Passive-cooling urban design plus formal heat governance
#00008
Reintroduce passive cooling from traditional hot-climate design — shaded streets, courtyards, underground air channels — and pair it with heat governance: naming and categorizing heatwaves so the public treats heat as seriously as storms.
Seville, Spain
OngoingIn June 2022 Seville launched proMETEO Sevilla, the first system in the world to tie heat-wave forecasts to health outcomes and to name and categorize heat waves the way storms are named. A three-tier categorization wei…
In 2021 Miami-Dade County appointed Jane Gilbert as the world's first Chief Heat Officer — a dedicated municipal post to coordinate extreme-heat response across agencies that otherwise treat heat as no one's specific re…
Ahmedabad, India
SuccessAfter a 2010 heatwave killed 1,344 people, Ahmedabad built South Asia's first Heat Action Plan (2013) — a governance-led response combining color-coded early-warning red alerts pushed to residents, hospital "heat wards"…
Seville, Spain
SuccessSeville revived a roughly 3,000-year-old passive-cooling technique, channeling air through underground galleries (a qanat-style system) to pre-cool it before delivering it to buildings and public space. The city has lon…