Thermal walks and participatory mapping as complementary methods for improving human thermal environment in urban areas, using the example of Czech cities

Abstrakt

ZÁKLADNÍ ÚDAJE: 35th International Geographical Congress 2024 Abstracts. Acharacle: Oxford Abstracts, 2024. [The International Geographical Congress 2024 /35./. 24.08.2024-30.08.2024, Dublin]. ABSTRAKT: Increasing effects of climate change together with growing urbanisation require efficient solutions in urban planning. Thermal environment in urban areas has been recently researched in hundreds of studies. However, psychological and social/behavioural factors which seem to substantially affect thermal comfort and the related thermal stress in urban areas remain understudied. On that account, we present the results and experience from our thermal walk and participatory-based cognitive thermal mapping campaigns in Czech cities on hot summer days. On the city scale, mental hotspots tend to concentrate into central locations (i.e. squares and transport hubs with good accessibility), whereas mental coolspots are related to larger parks (several hectares in area) or urban forests including water bodies. The importance of green spaces with the size of a few hectares is particularly pronounced at the neighbourhood scale. Nevertheless, at the street level, more detailed information is obtained from thermal walks, where standardised thermal sensation votes of respondents enable to detect details such as part of the streets with effective/non-effective tree spacing or appropriate/inappropriate building geometry. We expect further valuable information to be obtained from statistical models that analyse the results of thermal walks and participatory mapping in combination with the realistic fine-scale human thermal exposure simulated in the PALM model system.