Cooling Down Our Cities
What I watched: A 3-Part Plan to Take On Extreme Heat Waves | Eleni Myrivili | TED by Eleni Myrivili. Posted July 18, 2022.
Yesterday the airport runways at London’s Heathrow Airport melted. They actually melted and lifted up. I posted on social media that if that’s not a climate change canary in the coal mine, I’m not sure what is.
But it gets worse. Throughout large parts of Europe they are dealing with the worst heat event in their history with wildfires rampant and many people dying.
I’m not going to recount all the ways in which it should be clearly evident that the entire planet is amid a dire emergency. It’s going to get worse. That’s not fatalism or an overly negative perspective. It’s simply science. Science and scientists have been screaming from the rooftops for a while about the impending disaster climate change is already starting to unleash on our planet. Much of the damage is already baked in. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. A lot worse.
But that said, we have to start doing things now to mitigate the impact of climate change and the extreme heat events it will increasingly trigger. We don’t have a choice. To collectively throw up our hands in frustration and do nothing isn’t an option.
Heat is the deadliest of severe weather phenomena. That’s the message Eleni Myrivili, Chief Heat Officer of the city of Athens, Greece, drives home in this video. As part of the solution, Myrivili articulates three approaches to keep cities cooler during this time of rapid global temperature rise.
Myrivili points out that much like in other parts of the world, a lot of people thought climate change was a problem we’d only confront at some point in the far future. No. It’s now.
So, in my city of Athens, Greece, like in many cities around the world, a lot of people thought that climate change is something happening far away. Until ash started falling from the sky and temperatures neared 45 degrees Celsius in the summer of 2021, and they stayed above 40 degrees for several days. The asphalt sizzled and huge wildfires burned the forests around the city and people died.
This past decade has been the hottest ever recorded in history. While there have certainly been conversations and discussions about climate change for a while, extreme heat, especially in urban environments, hasn’t been given adequate consideration. Why have we so readily ignored the dangers posed by extreme heat?
We overlook extreme heat because heat doesn’t come with the drama of roofs sent flying and streets turned into rivers. Heat destroys quietly.
Our bodies can’t sustain such extreme heat conditions. That’s why so many people die. At the same time, our cities are not designed to best meet this challenge and our infrastructures are ill-suited to counter extreme heat. Our city surfaces absorb heat during hot days and then radiate it at night. Automobiles and ubiquitous air conditioning add yet more heat to the urban environment. Myrivili refers to this as the urban heat island.
Heat isn’t just an immediate death factor. It has many other negative impacts as well. It increases certain mental health problems. Heat increases fatigue and loss of sleep. Workplace injuries increase. Productivity is reduced. Heat waves increase violence in communities. Heat lowers the ability of children to learn.
Of course, not everyone is equally affected by extreme heat situations. Poor people are more vulnerable as are people with certain pre-existing conditions, people over the age of 60, pregnant women, young children, and people who work in physical labor fields. Wealthier people can shield themselves more readily from extreme heat in an energy-rich bubble of adequate housing and an endless supply of air conditioning, even though that same air conditioning is making the entire scenario worse overall.
Added to all that, increased heat across the globe has been baking farmers’ crops, reducing crop yields, and inhibiting vital pollination. Farm workers are attempting to adjust to extreme heat by going to work before daybreak or farming or harvesting at night to avoid the daytime heat.
At one point in the video Myrivili delivers a sledgehammer to the collective impression so many have that our cities and associated infrastructures are serving our needs in the face of the extreme heat calamities that await us all.
The great infrastructures that we have built with ingenuity and effort during the last two centuries, the dams, the waterways, the highways, the railways, they have been carefully engineered for a climate that no longer exists.
But what can we do? Myrivili specifically addresses what cities can do. She lumps her suggestions into three general categories: awareness; preparedness, and redesign.
Awareness means what it sounds like. We need to make sure the entire world recognizes the dire threat these extreme heat situations pose and how much worse they will be in the future.
To help figure out how to best increase such awareness, Athens partnered with the Arsht-Rockefeller Resilience Center to pilot in Athens and four US cities a new methodology for naming and categorizing heat waves much like is already done with hurricanes.
If you hear a category 4 hurricane is coming your way, you don’t expect life to go on as normal. You prepare and react accordingly. But we don’t have such a system for extreme heat situations that can be just as or more dangerous than a hurricane. Perhaps by categorizing heat waves like we do hurricanes people will take extreme heat more seriously.
Preparedness means to be ready for extreme heat situations and to protect the most vulnerable from the worst of the impacts. Strategies can be implemented such as a smartphone app that delivers personalized and real-time risk assessment and points out on a map where you can go to take cover and escape the heat. New York has created a buddy system so that during a heat wave people in a neighborhood keep checking on the most vulnerable to ensure their safety.
Myrivili offers other examples of ways cities are preparing for heat waves. The bottom line is we need to prepare, and we need to prepare now.
Awareness and preparedness are great and necessary. But the most important task at hand is the redesigning of our cities to make them cooler. Air conditioning is not the long-term answer.
Long before we started to design buildings and the layouts of our cities and cooling and heating buildings by burning fossil fuels, architecture had already incorporated centuries-long wisdom for solutions and materials that better resisted heat and cold and were fine-tuned to the local climate conditions.
So, thick walls with tiny openings, well-placed windows high up in the building that kind of move air from the bottom up and out, or outside shutters, shady and verdant internal courtyards with fountains, or outside walls that are whitewashed every spring to reflect the hot summer heat.
So, compare these to our concrete, steel and glass buildings that are air conditioned and that have sealed windows that basically make our cities into heat traps compounding instead of solving the problem.
It’s obvious when you step back from all this information that the entire world needs to “radically rethink and redesign our urban environments away from the logic of modernity, away from the logic of carbon modernity.”
Carbon is present throughout the lifecycle of what we do in our urban environments. The materials we use for buildings, the types of construction, how we heat and cool those buildings, all add to the urban heat. Even the ways we eat, consume, and move around our urban environments all have carbon somewhere in the supply chain or daily usage.
We need an urban design revolution, a total paradigm shift that probably needs to be led not by architects anymore, but landscape architects that know more about thermodynamics and soil and the importance of soils for biodiversity and all these things that can really bring about a real paradigm shift, a revolution in design, a new type of urbanity that actually is a different metabolic animal. Our cities of the future will be different metabolic systems.
While there are currently technologies in development that will help the urban heat situation, the most important thing to reduce heat in cities is to bring nature into the urban landscape. We need lots of trees, more biodiversity, and water as part of city surfaces.
So this is the time, this is the decade, and this means that cities have to really think about the interconnections and interdependencies between different urban systems, and they have to think of resources very carefully and build backup systems and redundancies, flexibility, and diversity, and think about sustainability and equity, because this is how we build resilience in our cities.
Myrivili ends her talk by mentioning a few examples of how cities such as Athens (Greece), Medellín (Colombia), Seoul (South Korea), Paris (France), and Melbourne, (Australia) have begun to change, adapt, and redesign.
Watch the video. Share this post with your friends. Perhaps some of them work in positions within government or private industry that can positively change the way our cities are designed for the extreme heat situations we are all going to face for the rest of our lives.
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