![Big outdoor stairwell cast in shade with a parent and child walking up](/sites/g/files/omnuum10826/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/datasmart/files/tam-wai-yedn7rgsecy-unsplash.jpg?itok=HwvsMi5i) # How Urban Planning and Shade Design can Combat Extreme Heat Episode Sixty-Three September 04, 2024 [ Betsy Gardner ](/betsy-gardner) In this episode, host Stephen Goldsmith speaks with Dr. Kelly Turner, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Geography at UCLA and Associate Director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. Dr. Turner delves into the concept of "shade infrastructure," exploring how cities can effectively use shade from both natural and built features to combat extreme heat. She highlights innovative approaches to urban shade, including the integration of building design and shade sails plus how schools can incorporate cooling strategies. Dr. Turner also discusses how cities can be involved with programs and receive funding at the federal level. Embed *Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts. The following is a transcript of their conversation.* **Stephen** **Goldsmith:** Welcome back. This is Stephen Goldsmith, professor of urban policy at Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University with another one of our podcasts. Today's podcast focuses on heat and data and what cities can do about it, and we are delighted to welcome Kelly Turner as our guest. She's an associate professor of urban planning and geography at UCLA, associate director of the Luskin Center for Innovation and lots of other things that we could talk about in your introduction, but they would take too much time. So we'll just say she's really well qualified on the subject we're talking about today. But more important for the introduction, we asked Kelly to come out and speak to a set of cities that we had brought together at Harvard on what they could do on the issues of heat and her participation on an urban heat resilience design workshop was terrifically well received. So we've asked her to come share some of her insights to our broader audience today. Welcome Kelly. **Kelly Turner:** Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. The workshop was a fantastic experience for me as well. **Stephen Goldsmith:** So before we get started, you just told me before we started that you just got back from running, which means you must've solved the heat problem in LA. **Kelly Turner:** I wish that I had, but as an urban climate researcher, I think I run a little differently than most people. I shade hop. I sometimes cross the street where other people wouldn't because I know it's buying me more times. So I don't know. It's the urban climate advantage for runners. **Stephen Goldsmith:** All right, well we will call out shade hopping. As one of the learnings from the conversation today. Many of our attendees found, in particular, all of them found your session particularly helpful, but the discussion of urban shade in the built environment was insightful. We've done work as you have on shade equals trees and green spaces, which of course it does, but you talked about it in a much broader way. Could you talk to us a little bit about what you mean in terms of urban shade in the built environment? **Kelly Turner:** Yeah. Well, my colleagues and I talk about shade as shade infrastructure more broadly. And what that recognizes is that shade can be cast by any vertical feature in the built environment. So trees are an excellent source of shade, but shade can also be cast by buildings, by canopies. They're all different ways. Basically anything that's blocking the sun is casting shade. And so if cities want to improve their shade infrastructure they need to both understand where and when shade is cast by all these features, but they also need to understand where it isn't and where it's needed. And so that's where we start from. And one of the reasons we're focused so heavily on shade in our research is that it is the most effective way to cool people outside when it's hot, especially in arid environments, but really anywhere. A person in the shade can feel 20 to 30 degrees Celsius cooler than someone standing in the sun just a few feet away. And that's using a metric called mean radiant temperature. And what that is a metric that accounts for the total heat burden from all the sources of heat, sun, wind, air, temperature, direct sun hitting the body and sun radiating off of surfaces. **Stephen Goldsmith:** Whoa, just a second. Your audience is not scientific. Some of them are, but not all of them. What was that mean phrase again? Try that one more time, more slowly. **Kelly Turner:** Okay. We use a metric called mean radiant temperature, or MRT for short. So most people are familiar with air temperature. That's what you look at your iPhone or your phone, you pull it up the weather app, that's your air temperature, your ambient air. And some people are aware of surface temperature or land surface temperature, which is either how hot a surface is or using satellites, how hot surfaces are, an estimation of the skin temperature of the earth. But the way a person actually feels, the feels like temperature, that depends on a whole bunch of factors. That's the temperature, the air, the humidity, how much sunlight's hitting the body, how much heat energy is radiating off of surfaces nearby. And so to account for that, we use a variable in our lab called mean radiant temperature, or MRT. And using that metric we find that people standing in the shade feel 20 to 30 degrees Celsius cooler than someone standing in the sun just a few feet away. **Stephen Goldsmith:** As you think about producing shade, if you were a city official for example, what other ways could you produce shade in a city that would bring down this mean temperature? **Kelly Turner:** Well, first of all, the high level finding is that all shade is better than no shade. There are some differences and some sort of trade-offs to consider. So trees are a fantastic way to produce shade, but you could also produce shade from buildings. So thinking about having just moderate levels of density, you can increase the amount of shade that you have in a community. So we're finding, for instance, just sort of Los Angeles levels of density, which is not very dense at all, we can shift a system from a tree-dominant shade system to a building-dominant shade system. Thinking about the orientation of buildings is also something that you can think about doing and also being really creative about shade sails and overhangs. I had the privilege to be in Singapore, which is a very hot and humid environment, and they have put into the codes for hundreds of years that sidewalks all have building overhangs. And so little things like that can really greatly improve our shade infrastructure. **Stephen Goldsmith:** I want to ask you more about that. Before I do, if it's not too personal, can we go back to hopping for a second? **Kelly Turner:** Yes. **Stephen Goldsmith:** So let's take what you just said, which is pretty sophisticated and just make it even more tangible. So when you hopped, when you ran shade hopping this morning, just describe a little bit like when would you cross the street, right? It's obvious that if you could run under a tree that makes sense. But as a person that passerby, because I think I'll make it more tangible for city officials. What does that look like when you try to find these kind of shade oases that may exist? **Kelly Turner:** Yeah. Well, there's a few levels in which I can do this. So in the neighborhood that I live in, there's a clear transect from north to south where the tree canopy slowly declines. So you go from having Griffith Park with lots of big trees and big tree canopies to having kind of palm trees that are not doing very much to having no trees at all. And so if it's really hot outside, I wouldn't even choose a route that took me down to the more southern part of that transect. As I've already selected a route, yes, as you're saying, if you see a tree dip into it or if you see there's a stretch across the street that's shady... In fact, I was just doing this with my daughter the other day on the way to the farmer's market, she's like, mom, we need to cross the street. There's shade over there. Clearly she's absorbed. But it makes a big difference. And the reason why is because it extends the amount of time you're able to exert yourself while you're outside, whereas the sun will zap your energy and make you feel just hotter. So you will have less time that you're able to actually do whatever activity you're doing comfortably. **Stephen Goldsmith:** Have you been associated with a shade tool that a city designer could use? **Kelly Turner:** Yeah. Well, first of all, that's a good transition. In a dream world, there would be an app that's a feature on Google Maps and it would tell you if your route was shady or not, like what you should take. That's my friend, Ariane Middel at ASU. That's her vision. But we're creating a different sort of tool. So we have a study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to democratize shade data for cities. The idea is to help cities empower them with the kind of data to keep people safe as possible when it's hot outdoors. So specifically, we're developing a shade map for 100 urban regions in the United States, and it's going to be a feature that's integrated into American Forests' Tree Equity Score. So that means that there will be census block group data on shade for 100 cities around the US. So what will it contain? It'll have the minimum shade and maximum shade during the day. It will have if shades produced by trees or buildings, and it will have the distribution of the shade throughout the city. And then for a subset of cities, because the analysis we're doing is actually higher resolution than census block. The reason we do it, I should say, the census block level is so that you can compare with demographic factors. And so you can see if there's inequities in terms of race, class, other vulnerability features like age. But for a subset of cities, we're developing high resolution policy use cases that can be used for things like for instance, we're thinking about how could shade be incorporated to a safe routes to school program or how can we think about bus transit systems and shade in the last mile? And we're on track to have this tool ready, hopefully by the new year. **Stephen Goldsmith:** I'm going to ask you a question which I'm going to try to make comprehensible, but maybe not. So we showed a group of city officials a couple years ago, a augmented reality tool from ESRI. I remember it was like Boston Commons and it said, here's a proposed building and we are going to move the building. So on July 3rd at three in the afternoon, this is the shade, this is the shadowing thrown off by this building so that people who were involved in the permitting and community responsiveness could see the implications of the building. Could a group of advanced city planners who really care about heat take what you just described, integrate it into the permitting process so they could actually see the implications? Or is that like one step too many? **Kelly Turner:** No, absolutely. You're on the right track with that question. So knowing where shade is, it's just the first step and knowing where you want to put it is a second step. Another step you have to take is understanding the policy landscape. So that's the city codes, but that can also be city, state, or even federal legislation. So I'll give you two anecdotes that illustrate why this is so important to kind of audit your policy landscape. So at a very local level, I think it was last summer, one of our partners unveiled this bus shade structure called La Sombrita, and it quickly was maligned as the most hated shade structure or bus stop on the internet. And that's because people looked at this tiny little telephone booth size thing and said, that can't possibly produce that much shade. Why are you touting this as a shade structure? But when you look at what happened, well, they needed to design it to be installed in a certain number of hours because otherwise they needed a different kind of permit. They had to put it on a certain kind of pole, it couldn't be put into an actual transit owned bus stop. There were all these rules. And once you start carving away at all the rules about land use, all they could do is a little telephone size kind of shade blade type thing. So that's something that cities need to do, some of our rules working against us there in the codes. Zooming in at a broader sort of maybe state level another great example is schools. A lot of schools want to put shade structures over their playground equipment, which is a great no brainer place to install shade. However, there is a federal law that requires a 20% Americans with Disabilities Act match to upgrade facilities to be ADA compliant. It's triggered anytime you do an outdoor facilities upgrade. California thought that was a fantastic idea and doubled it to 40%. So any school that wanted to put in a shade structure now had to pay double that amount in order to install a shade structure. Our schools are pretty resource constrained and so that would put it out of the means usually for the schools that needed it most. So a piece of legislation was needed to roll back that 40% ADA compliance to 20%, the federal level, in order for schools not to have to do that if they just wanted to put in a shade structure. **Stephen Goldsmith:** So we're trying to inform cities on what they can do in design in their build environment, I know you're now leading the Center for Excellence for Heat Resilient Communities. Tell us about what that is and should cities pay attention to it and why. **Kelly Turner:** Cities should absolutely pay attention to it. The window, the policy window has opened for heat and for the federal government to start thinking about how they can better support communities in becoming more heat resilient, and here's how. First of all, you may have seen just a couple days ago, the first federal Heat Action Plan was released. I would pay attention to that because it's got all the goals that the federal government has around heat in it. But our Center is a little piece of this movement. So our goal is to figure out the best ways to support local heat resilient strategies, to reduce heat risk, to develop data-driven solutions to leverage federal investments. And we have three sort of overarching tasks associated with that goal. One, we're developing a comprehensive Heat Resilient Communities' framework, and we're doing that iteratively with a group of experts and advisors. We're also doing that as we roll this out with communities. So the second thing is we're going to be enabling at least 30 communities over the next three years, community's broadly defined, that could be a municipality, it could be a school district, it could be an Indigenous community. We even have room for international case studies. And they're going to be implementing elements of this framework and testing it. They're going to give us feedback on how it works and how we might have better kind of frameworks for community resilience. And then at the end, we're going to develop a set of recommendations about action strategies that NOAA, NIHHIS and all their federal partners on extreme heat can do to prioritize and coordinate investments in communities. So we're really looking forward to doing that. We have a really fantastic group already of more than 50 partners on board so far. **Stephen Goldsmith:** As you know from attending the meeting, we've been encouraging cities to think about mapping layers, right? So social determinants of health, heat, PM 2.5 where air quality is bad, equity indices so you can identify where's doing the most harm to communities that have been neglected for a long period of time. How do you think about mapping as it relates to the work we've been talking about today? **Kelly Turner:** Well, clearly I think mapping shade is a priority, so hopefully that'll be out for everyone soon. Within our Center, we have a couple cores. So the Center is based around six cores. I should mention those and then I'll answer your question more directly about the mapping. So we have six cores. The first is stress testing emergency response systems. The second one is developing resilience indicators, that's an area where mapping can come in for sure. Three is heat action planning, that's another area where we use geospatial methods. We recommend those for heat action planning. Core four is doing benefit cost analysis. Core five is modeling, again, very mapping oriented. And then six is engagement. And so throughout all of this, we would encourage cities to think about how they can leverage maps of exposure, sensitivity. But also things you might not normally flag, like looking at things like school districts or congressional districts, which is something we did in a tool we have at Luskin Center for California called the Healthy Places Index, Extreme Heat Edition. And then I would also say another project, this is not shade oriented, but California is rolling out a new heat ranking tool. It is being co-developed by UCLA faculty and ESRI, and it's going to categorize heat events, kind of like a hurricane would have category one, category two. And so one of the things that we are doing at Luskin Center is working with stakeholders across the state to figure out why would you use this tool versus the National Weather Service tool that is available? How can you use this kind of data versus other kind of data? Kind of disambiguating because, as I said, we're having sort of a heat renaissance right now. Part of that is a proliferation of tools and data, and it might be difficult for a community that's just getting started to understand why we have all these tools and which one they should be using in different contexts. **Stephen Goldsmith:** It's a lot of maps and a lot of tools. They can find many of those on your website if they want more information? **Kelly Turner:** Yes, I would direct them to two different websites. First go to heat.gov, that's the NIHHIS website with a ton of tools and information on our Center. And then if you go to the Luskin Center for Innovation Heat Equity Program webpage, you'll see a list of all these various products that I've been talking about that we host. **Stephen Goldsmith:** Great, thank you. Can we go back to the 20, 40% playground shading? I think that cost is a real issue, of course. One way to think about costs in terms of heat mitigation would be better data on where to put shading in, whether it's a bus shelter or a special type of tree. Another might be where you could find funding to help with this. So could you educate us a little bit on federal and state resources that might help cities respond? **Kelly Turner:** Well, cities by and large are under leveraging federal resources for heat. And partly that is because I think heat hasn't been traditionally thought of in some of the buckets of funding that it could be eligible for. And it's also because some of the buckets of funding are tilted towards other types of hazards. So there's some alignment that needs to happen both in terms of community awareness of funding and federal funding. So for instance, there are a number of grants that FEMA has available. So FEMA isn't right now declaring heat as natural disaster that they come in and do intervention, but they do have long-term resilience grants. And so right now, only about less than 1% of those funds have gone towards heat, shade, tree, a heat-centric project. But that's certainly a resource that communities could tap into. Other ways that they could look at EPA TCTAC grants that are for community environmental justice and engagement. Another great source might be LIHEAP, although that's another example of where funds are kind of tilted towards cold weather climates. We deal with schools a lot, another great example I like to talk about is in California, we have some funds for urban greening for any public space. And schools, by and large don't go for this mainly because they don't have the capacity or the awareness that they can, but also because it requires a joint use agreement with the community. So that means that schools cannot be closed off to the community to qualify as public space. So figuring out ways to get those pipes of money flowing is a policy challenge that I think we want to address through the Center. **Stephen Goldsmith:** I have to say, I don't think anyone exceeds California in the number of good ideas that are impossible to implement because of the rules along the way. But when I was deputy mayor of New York, one of the major national organizations was involved in the conversion of asphalt playgrounds to green spaces, and asphalt parking lot. And the change not only on the temperature, but the whole feeling environment of the school overnight was just a totally different experience. There was just wonderful examples of what you're talking about. Just as we get to the end here, Kelly, so much you have to offer. What's the single most important thing I didn't ask you about that people who are listening should know if the goal is to reduce the impact of heat through the built community? **Kelly Turner:** I think the single most important thing that people need to know is that while surfaces certainly matter a little bit, they cannot reduce the heat burden for people in a public health set of goals. If you really want to change the experience for people, you have to either block from hitting their bodies, provide better ventilation and airflow, or get them inside if it's extremely hot. Grass, reflective coatings, asphalt, there's some minor differences. But unless you do a really, really widespread comprehensive deployment of surfaces combined with shading and ventilation, you're not going to get the level of cooling we need in a climate changed future. **Stephen Goldsmith:** I was a little surprised how slow schools were to use ventilation dollars that were available as a result of the COVID response, right? Not just for COVID, but for the purposes of heat that you mentioned. And I don't know if some of those dollars may still be available, but we heard from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child about, I think you may have been there about the effect of ventilation and coolness on test scores, for example, very tangible thing. So is that money still out there or is that all expired? I should know the answer to that. I don't. **Kelly Turner:** Yeah, I should know the answer to that and I don't. But I know that UndauntedK12, which is a nonprofit that's tracking this, just put a report out yesterday showing which schools have taken advantage of this funding. And you know what? I agree. It's shockingly few. And I should just say I have a child who's seven years old and in the public school system, and my experience is that they are incredibly constrained as it is in public schools. And so it's not shocking to me that they're under leveraging resources in school districts. **Stephen Goldsmith:** Well, this is Stephen Goldsmith from the Bloomberg Center, and we've just had a wonderful conversation with Kelly Turner, who's a professor at UCLA and director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, one of the country's leading experts on what cities can do with their physical and built environment to mitigate heat damage, and create opportunity for the residents. Thank you, Kelly, for a very inspiring conversation. **Kelly Turner:** Thank you so much for having me. ## About the Author ### Betsy Gardner ![Headshot of Betsy Gardner](/sites/g/files/omnuum10826/files/styles/hwp_1_1__100x100_scale/public/2025-05/Betsy%20Headshot%20resize.jpg?itok=k2OsSp1g) Betsy Gardner is the editor of Data-Smart City Solutions and the producer of the Data-Smart City Pod. Prior to this, Betsy worked in a variety of roles in higher education, focusing on deconstructing racial and gender inequality through research, writing, and facilitation. She also researched government spending and transparency at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Betsy holds a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Policy from Northeastern University, a bachelor’s degree in Art History from Boston University, and a graduate certificate in Digital Storytelling from the Harvard Extension School. 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