Urban Nature for Heat-resilient Green Neighbourhoods

Although urban trees have gathered significant attention as a cooling strategy at a time when extreme heat events are attracting the attention of urban planners and policy-makers globally, residents’ groups and civil society organisations are arguing that traditional top-down planning approaches ignore residents’ on-the-ground experiences and entrench existing inequalities. To address this with new research, this project has built an interdisciplinary team spanning environmental sociology, urban ecology, health and wellbeing and built environment.

This team will work with communities and urban planning practitioners in two cities in different climate regions – Glasgow (Scotland) and Taipei (Taiwan) – to collaboratively make sense of the broader social and cultural landscape to which environmental science-driven approaches to urban nature need to respond.

Principal Investigator: Dr Leslie Mabon, Open University