Thermal Comfort in Cities

One of the reasons I love living in San Francisco, OK the major reason, is the weather. After growing up in Houston and Bakersfield CA, I noticed that my body just responded better to less heat, especially after running so many miles. When I used to go race at Stanford, I felt extra energized and less lethargic before and after the runs and races.

And don’t get me wrong, I loved my neighborhood in Houston and living in Austin. There are so many wonderful people there doing amazing work creating amazing places. But being permanently below 70 degrees for the most part with fog below 60 much of the time is energizing when you already run hot.

And sometimes I forget what heat is like though I lived through it for so many years. We visited my cousin last week in the Central Valley and it was 101 degrees. Luckily her pool was cool but it’s clear that type of temperature isn’t sustainable for human kind.  After leaving, just going up to 5,000 feet into the Sierras to 85 degrees in the shade of towering trees was an amazing difference in thermal comfort.

As the world heats up we’ll need to consider how to making walking and biking more pleasant, even in hotter climates. This means cooling places down through interventions such as water features, tree planting, and designing buildings with shade.

As Federica Buricco notes in an article in Building Design, there’s a lot we can learn from cities with hotter climates in Southern Europe or the Middle East. Small public spaces with shade, vegetation, and water are ideal compared to wide streets and large open spaces that allow the sun to beat down on people.

She also notes that we often measure transportation access in speed and efficiency rather than comfort, but as Blaine Brownell also notes from an item in yesterday’s newsletter, permeability that makes walking more fun and exploratory while also being intuitive and comfortable would be beneficial to encourage more active transportation.

In the shade of the Sierras the heat didn’t seem so bad, we can design our cities to provide that comfort too.

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