/

Seville

Solutions

Heat Maps and Hard Choices: Inside a City’s First Cooling Plan

Heat Maps and Hard Choices: Inside a City’s First Cooling Plan

Heat Maps and Hard Choices: Inside a City’s First Cooling Plan

One city mapped every street by temperature and found a nine-degree gap between rich and poor neighbourhoods. Then it had to decide what to fix first.

Portrait of Ines Castell

Ines Castell

Climate Correspondent

8 min read

Woman crossing a sunny city street with cars

In this story

Portrait of Ines Castell

Ines Castell

Ines writes about ice, heat and the people adapting to both. She files most stories from somewhere cold.

The map is red almost everywhere, but not evenly. The hottest streets are those with the fewest trees, the most asphalt and the oldest housing.

City planners used thousands of sensor readings to create the first block-by-block heat map of the city — and then published it, knowing what it would show.

Shade as infrastructure

The plan treats trees, fountains and shaded bus stops as essential infrastructure. Every new project must now prove it lowers street temperature.

“Shade is not a luxury. On some streets, it is survival.”

Choosing where to start

The first phase targets the ten hottest districts. Residents elsewhere complain about waiting; officials say the data leaves no room for politics.

End of story — thanks for reading NEWSROOM 27.

Create a free website with Framer, the website builder loved by startups, designers and agencies.