Urban Greening for Heat Resilient Neighbourhoods – Research Project

Aligned with Climate Ready Clyde, Sniffer are supporting the Open University and Ming-Chuan University in Taiwan to undertake British Academy-funded research in Glasgow City and Taipei. The research aims to understand how communities in both cities have experienced extreme hot weather, and how trees and green spaces might help to reduce heat risk in the future.

About the project

Extreme heat is a major concern under a changing climate, particularly for cities. In Glasgow, summer heatwaves are project to be more frequent and more extreme as the climate changes. Maintaining and enhancing urban greenery can help cities adapt to extreme hot weather and cool down neighbourhoods. However, the planning and maintenance of green spaces needs to be done carefully, recognising that not everyone is at equal risk from or equally able to adapt to extreme heat. It is vital that communities’ perspectives, knowledge and experiences are included as heat risk reduction strategies are developed.

This project will explore an approach to help include residents’ own knowledge and experiences of urban green space and extreme heat into planning and decision-making. Bringing community members into the research process itself is important, to ensure research is being done with and for people, rather than ‘to’ and ‘about’ them and to involve communities in generating new knowledge about their places.

The project will include:

• A review of existing literature and policy ‘best practice’ on urban heat and greening.
• Satellite analysis of green space and temperatures across the cities.
• A survey of residents’ attitudes and behaviours to hot weather and local green space.
• Collaboration with local anchor organisations and community researchers to generate understanding of how urban greening can best respond to heat and other environmental and societal challenges.
• Learning and knowledge exchange events between the two cities.

Urban Greening for Heat Resilient Neighbourhoods supports delivery of Flagship Action 2 of the Glasgow City Region Climate Adaptation Strategy and Action Plan, enabling communities to help shape climate-ready places.

Our role

We are supporting the Glasgow community research element of the project. Using the Glasgow City Region Climate Vulnerability Map, we have identified two neighbourhoods both at risk of heat impacts, but with different levels of greenspace – Pollok and Govan. In each neighbourhood we are working with local creative anchor organisations, including the Village Storytelling Centre and Impact Arts, to help us recruit and train community members to act as researchers within each neighbourhood.

These community researchers will carry out ‘walking and talking’ interviews with others from their neighbourhood to gather stories about green space and hot weather, understand what changes people want to see, and how their experiences relate to other needs such as health and wellbeing, safety, and social interaction. Feedback workshops in autumn 2023 will then explore what the community researchers find, and how to take the findings forward.

Find out more

If you would like to find out more about this project or explore opportunities to collaborate, please contact eleanor@sniffer.org.uk or have a look at a more detailed project overview here.