Planning for cooler cities: a plan quality evaluation for Urban Heat Island consideration

ABSTRACT

City strategic plans and enabling policies provide a framework for and inform future development across multiple scales. An exemplar city strategic plan will be one based on evidence, enabled by complementary policy outcomes, and built on the knowledge of the existing landscape. This study evaluated the plan quality of eighteen metropolitan strategic plans for city members in the 100 Resilient Cities initiative. A protocol was developed containing thirty-two indicators to assess plans capacity to act as a strategic planning tool to develop, analyse and implement strategies for the Urban Heat Island (UHI) and climate change mitigation and adaptation. The evaluation indicated that strategies addressing the UHI are rarely included in metropolitan plans. Strategic plans showed a lack of evidence-base to inform the potential actions. Urban warming is often linked to extreme weather events anticipated under climate change, not the UHI as a systemic and increasing phenomenon. We recommend that the pathway to addressing UHI mitigation and adaptation may lie in its nexus to aspects of climate change that concurrently can serve to support liveable and resilient cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban Heat Island
• strategic planning
• plan quality evaluation
• climate change
• resilient cities

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge that the work conducted in the production of this research article was financially supported by the Macquarie University internal Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Alaa Elgendawy is a PhD candidate at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research interests include environmental planning, spatial sciences, environmental impact assessment (EIA), and architectural design.

Peter Davies is an Associate Professor of environmental policy and planning at Macquarie University. Prior to commencing an academic career in 2012 he spent 20 years working in the public and private sector as an environmental researcher, consultant, and manager.

Hsing-Chung Chang is a Spatial Information Scientist. His research interests include vegetation and land cover and land use monitoring, change detection and 3D modelling using remotely sensed data with the aid of geographic information systems (GIS). He has also contributed to many multi-disciplinary projects on natural disaster mitigations (e.g. bushfires and seismic deformation), public transport planning, biodiversity conservation, social behaviour studies, etc., using spatial analyses.