City Parks as Cooling Centers

Researchers at Princeton University are looking for ways to cool urban parks, reports Patrick Sisson, so they can serve as neighborhood cooling centers during extreme heat waves. According to professor Elie Bou-Zeid, “It’ll certainly be more pleasant to be in a park than in some indoor stadium where nobody wants to go.”

The strategies being tested include:

• Kirigami: a paper cutting and folding technique that can be used in architecture to control air flow and make structures cooler.
• Misters: common in places like Palm Springs, misters can significantly cool the air.
• Cold tubes: panels with cold water pipes “draw in heat from the bodies of people standing outside the structure, making them feel cooler without actually cooling the surrounding air.”