Urban Heat Mitigation: Current and Future Trends

There has been a significant growth in the knowledge base to suggest that mass urbanization has long-term impacts on climate change at macro-scales with immediate effects on rising temperature profiles in city centers. Urban Heat Islands (UHI) have been used as an evidence base to document city temperature profiles and to mitigate heat stress waves. Metrics, measures, solutions, methods, and strategies have been developed to facilitate improvements in this area. However, there still exists a systemic gap in strategic, inductive, and visionary research into the future approaches to mitigation of UHI effects. This becomes even more of a necessity given the most recent societal changes in, and in interactions between, urban, suburban, and rural areas across the world imposed by what is known as the “new normal”; what has made a socio-morpho-cultural transformation inevitable. This has painted a new picture of novel technologies, with some unprecedented level of necessity, whose impact on our collective settlements are yet to take shape and get managed—and if needed, reshaped, accordingly. This chapter investigates the concepts of UHI, their triggered effects, and their mitigation with a lens of what future scenarios may have to offer for our urban, suburban, and rural settlements, in light of the changes in/of urban areas recently introduced or deemed necessary for the future. Greenscapes, bluescapes, carshares, the phasing out of fossil-fueled private cars from cities, flying cars and taxis, electric cars and transportation systems, UAV delivery, pedestrianization (in its traditional or more radical sense), heat recovery, high albedo (and other non-reflective, non-absorbent) materials, passive design strategies (evapotranspiration, natural ventilation, etc.), 5G, APU/CPU/GPU (future of local processing), e-living, Industry 4.0, AI/ML/DL and smart cities implications are just but a few of either totally unprecedented phenomena or rather old concepts recently re-conceptualized, re-engineered, re-developed, or updated, with direct and indirect implications for mitigating UHI effects and heat stress waves.