How To Heatproof a City: Lessons from the Gulf

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Air-conditioning can cool a building but it cannot cool a city. As heatwaves become longer and more intense, urban planners are confronting a challenge engineers once barely considered: how do you design an entire city to stay cool?

But climate change is pushing even desert cities beyond the conditions they were originally designed for.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), cities are warming at roughly twice  the global average because of rapid urbanisation, while summer temperatures in parts of the GCC could exceed 55 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

“The principal drivers [of rising temperatures] are attributed to extensive heat-absorbing surfaces, like asphalt, concrete and conventional roofing materials,” says Hani Abdel Razeq, director of sustainability at AESG, a Dubai-based engineering and sustainability consultancy.

Those materials absorb heat throughout the day before slowly releasing it overnight, preventing cities from cooling after sunset. Add limited vegetation, inadequate shade and tightly packed buildings that restrict airflow, and the result is the urban heat-island effect – neighbourhoods that remain significantly hotter than their surroundings.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, urban heat islands can make cities up to 7 degrees Celsius warmer than nearby rural areas.

Global consultancy Strategy& notes that the built environment is responsible for approximately 40% of global CO₂ emissions. With Gulf countries continuing to build cities at a fast pace, the challenge is no longer simply constructing urban environments, but ensuring they remain comfortable and resilient in a hotter climate.

It isn’t one technology. It’s dozens working together – from street layouts and trees to AI modelling, reflective materials and district cooling – all designed to reduce the amount of heat a city absorbs in the first place.

Many of the most effective cooling strategies are surprisingly low tech. Shade remains one of the most powerful tools available. Trees, shaded walkways and narrower streets reduce heat absorption while making outdoor spaces more comfortable.

Long before computer modelling and artificial intelligence, Gulf architecture had already developed ways of coping with extreme heat.

“Traditional Gulf neighbourhoods addressed these problems through narrow sikkas, courtyards, shaded passages and compact development,” says Dr Mohammad Radfar, associate professor in sustainable urban design and planning at the University of Birmingham, Dubai.

“Msheireb Downtown Doha uses some of these principles by incorporating compact blocks, shaded streets, carefully oriented routes, and reduced reliance on cars.”

Cooling doesn’t stop at street level. Across the Gulf, developers are also cooling entire neighbourhoods rather than individual buildings.

District cooling plants produce chilled water and pipe it underground to multiple buildings, using up to 50% less electricity than conventional air-conditioning, according to Empower, a sustainable cooling solutions provider.

The approach has become a defining feature of many of the region’s largest developments. Expo City Dubai relies on district cooling infrastructure as part of its sustainability strategy, while Saudi Arabia’s Neom and the Red Sea have also incorporated district cooling into their masterplans as they build entirely new cities designed for extreme heat.

Increasingly, cities are being designed in software before they’re built, allowing planners to simulate where heat will collect and how wind will move through streets years before construction begins.

One of the biggest advances is microclimate modelling, which simulates how heat, wind and shade will behave across a development before construction starts.

“While satellites can reveal large-scale temperature patterns on urban surfaces, they cannot always describe what a pedestrian feels,” says Radfar. “Cities and researchers are now mixing satellite data with street-level sensors, thermal cameras, mobile measurements and information about buildings, materials, shade, humidity and wind.”

Artificial intelligence is also reshaping the design process. AI-supported parametric design allows architects to test thousands of building layouts, street orientations and facade designs to maximise airflow while reducing heat gain.

Used alongside responsive shading systems and smart irrigation, studies have found these approaches can reduce local temperatures by between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius, depending on the project.

Digital twins create virtual replicas of entire districts, allowing planners to test how buildings affect wind, shade and heat before construction begins. Designers can identify where heat will accumulate, where trees should be planted and which street layouts create the best airflow.

Materials matter too. Reflective roofs, permeable paving and advanced coatings reduce the amount of heat absorbed by buildings and streets, lowering the energy needed to keep them cool.

“Experimental coatings have been able to reduce surface temperatures dramatically in laboratory settings – which are practical problems that can arise in Gulf conditions,” Radfar explains.

None of these innovations can eliminate Gulf summers. Air-conditioning will remain essential, but smarter design can reduce the energy needed to keep cities livable. As cities from southern Europe to South Asia confront Gulf-like summers, the region may end up exporting something even more valuable than its skyline: a blueprint for building cities in a hotter world.

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