Hot Cities

Background

Australian cities are facing many challenges including housing growing populations while mitigating the harms of urban heat exposure. Due to economic and demographic drivers, cities are dynamic and under continual (re)development which manifests in expansion, densification, and upgrading of existing housing stocks. This (re)development changes built and natural environments and the thermal properties of residential areas in ways that can increase exposure to harmful heat.

Extreme heat kills more Australians than any other natural hazard, it affects mental and physical health, and limits economic productivity. The Sustainable Development Goals, the Australian Smart Cities Plan, and local government initiatives recognise the threat of extreme heat in urban environments. Urban (re)development occurs in piecemeal fashion, with varying degrees of planning oversight, and without consistent monitoring. Without detailed and consistent maps of where and how parcels are (re)developing, the magnitude of warming caused by (re)development remains unclear.

Using city-scale high-resolution land cover and built form datasets and geospatial machine learning and temperature modelling this project will address these data and knowledge gaps. It will generate a fine-scale picture of how cities are being developed, quantify the impacts of this development on built and nature environments and heat exposure, assess the effectiveness of existing planning controls, and generate new insights to guide planning and management of urban areas that are climate resilient. A detailed description of the project's work is provided below.