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

Alaa Elgendawy*, Peter Davies, Hsing-Chung Chang

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    11 Citations (Scopus)

    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.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)531-553
    Number of pages23
    JournalJournal of Environmental Policy and Planning
    Volume22
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2020

    Keywords

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

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