🏙 Cities in Mind is your go-to destination to learn about cities, technology, innovation and the people behind them. All that through an Asian perspective.
About me: 👋🏻 I am Fabien, an urban planner based in Singapore since 2015. I write this regular newsletter and host a podcast series, that you can find on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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🌡 Globally, cities are warming up.
In Southeast Asia, some cities, such as Singapore, are heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world. In the city-state, maximum daily temperatures could reach 35 to 37 degrees Celsius by year 2100.
Other countries already experience hotter temperatures than this but the reason this spells trouble for Singapore is that humidity is high all year round and this could lead to potentially deadly situations.
☀️ Singapore’s climate change challenges are indeed compounded by the Urban Heat Island effect. Because of hard, heat-absorbing surfaces, the temperature of a built-up urban area in Singapore can be several degrees higher than the land around it.
In this episode, I meet with Lea Rüfenacht, Coordinator of the Cooling Singapore project at the Singapore-ETH Centre. Cooling Singapore is a research programme that explores climate-responsive design and planning strategies to mitigate the UHI effect.
🌇 Together we discuss how Singapore is responding to this defining challenge, investigating ways to stay cool by design while foregrounding new technological approaches, such as the Digital Urban Climate Twin.
📝 Some resources that I have used to prepare for this episode:
Why Singapore could be a model for cooler cities in a world heating up
Air-con addicted Singapore seeks new ways to escape urban heat trap
Enjoy the episode and see you next week!
Episode 07 - Cooling Cities - The Rise of Climatic Urban Design in Asia