r/urbandesign

This current heatwave got me thinking about just how hot all these asphalt savannahs are. They really heat up the surrounding area. They're also ugly af and are a waste of space. But above ground parking garages are also ugly brutalist boxes, ao why don't we just use underground garages?

Boston has the right idea. Boston Common garage is a huge underground garage with Boston Common sitting atop at ground level, a nice green park with grass and trees. It's the best setup, with many landmarks within walking distance.

When I went to Germany, France, UK, and the Netherlands, I noticed a lack of accessibility standards in places. The ones that stood out to me the most were the lack of handrails and the lack of crosswalk accessibility. Look at this bike intersection in the Netherlands. It seems like a nightmare for a wheelchair user or a blind person to cross. The slight ramps that do exist are very narrow and steep and don't have the bumps that American crosswalks have. The crosswalks don't have timers either. Maybe I'm cherry-picking examples here, but I remember seeing many more examples. When I was at a train station (Intercity in Amsterdam), I instinctively reached for a handrail, because in America handrail height and distance from the wall is standardized everywhere, only to find that there was no proper handrail.

https://preview.redd.it/97p5jvrqcuah1.png?width=2584&format=png&auto=webp&s=829306b18f9c5b4f995e406e36a965e01b02231f

I’ve been thinking about how walkable a city actually is in 95°F heat. Google Maps will route you for distance, sometimes elevation. It won’t route you to the shaded side of the street — even when that’s the difference between a tolerable walk and a miserable one.

Building heights are open data in most major cities. Sun position is solved math. You can cast shadows onto the sidewalk network at any timestamp and prefer the shaded segments within a reasonable time budget. The implementation isn’t trivial but the physics is straightforward.

Some questions I keep hitting:

1. How would you weight shade vs distance? My current default is a 12% time budget — if the shaded route is more than 12% longer, fall back to fastest. Curious where planners would land on that ratio.

2. Should the directions tell you to cross the street when the shaded side switches mid-block? I do. It feels right. Curious if planners think it’s antisocial — the analog of “jaywalking on the recommendation line.”

3. What’s the right baseline for comparison? Are we measuring against shortest path, fastest path, or some idealized accessibility metric? The shade-as-equity argument feels like it lives somewhere between heat-island maps and ADA distance limits, and I haven’t found a clean framework yet.

4. Heat equity question that’s been bothering me: shade routing presumes the shade exists. In neighborhoods with low canopy and few tall buildings (often the same neighborhoods that score worst on heat-island indices), the tool offers less. Is “the shaded route” an equity-positive product if its value distribution mirrors existing disparities?

I’ve built a working prototype across 50+ cities — modeled every building footprint and height, cast shadows against the sun’s live azimuth, baked the sidewalk network at the borough or district level for the dense ones. Happy to share if folks are interested, but mostly curious what people who think about this stuff professionally would prioritize differently.

What am I missing?

We are seeing across the world, both in major cities and smaller cities where there is cultural heritage, an overtourism situation that is causing backlashes from local communities, cities and individuals. The threat goes beyond the arrival of vast amounts of tourists, but on the effects on the economic, political, social and cultural essence of the cities and locations in question.

Overtourism not only rises the price of living and goods in these cities, but the fear amongst the local communities and individuals to lose their identity and sense of community.

Urban designers have a difficult job as it exists, but urban design for the present and future now must deal with how overtourism can be dealt with in design, mobility and the existence of community in the city. The question that has to be answered is how to adapt design to bring solutions to these problems, within the confines of today’s economic, political and social environment. Truly a problem that needs solutions now.

Urban heat islands in dense, old cities:

Paris, London, Rome: dense stone and masonry cities with narrow streets and little green space bake during heat events. American cities are generally more spread out with more tree cover in residential areas. Is density killing Europeans?