Q&A with Greg Kats: Creating cooler cities through smarter urban design

What are smart surfaces and how do they work?

A smart surface is any surface of a city that allows the city to better manage sun and rain. Right now, city surfaces make cities hotter, more flooded, more prone to mold and illness. So the term “smart surfaces” is really intended to allow cities to think about surfaces differently and manage all of their surfaces as one integrated solution.

What inspired the creation of the Smart Surfaces Coalition?

The way cities manage surfaces is very piecemeal. You want to do parks? Parks and recreation. You want to do roads? It's the department of transportation.

It's highly fragmented. And it's frustrating, because we know from a lot of data that the surface of your city has an enormous impact on quality of life, health and whether people can get outside and run and play and be part of a community.

We also know from the writing of the great Jane Jacobs and her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” that what allows a city to be livable is people outside, which she calls “eyes on the street.”

If you have eyes on the street, crime goes away, and if crime goes away, you have more people outside because it's safe, which means more eyes on the street, which means crime goes down.

Kats

If you can intervene in a city and make surfaces more reflective so it's cooler and greener, and more trees, more bioswales, more rain gardens — the city becomes a much more attractive place.

Who is most at risk from heat and climate dangers in cities and why?

The people most at risk are people with less money and who live in hotter areas.

In our work in Baltimore, for example, three of the communities we looked at were low-income communities which had 5-7% tree coverage. There are other areas of the city that have up to 35-40% tree coverage. Not surprisingly, those are wealthy white areas. And not surprisingly, the lower tree areas were predominately minority. And because of dark and impervious surfaces, that's radiating heat.

The people who suffer are people who are less well off; they are children, infants, elderly, sick and unfortunately that tends to concentrate in lower-income areas that are traditionally minority.

It's absolutely a racial disparity issue and it's absolutely an economic disparity issue.

What public health organizations are you partnering with?

We have three public health-oriented partners that we were fortunate in raising funding for and with: the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

A skywalk at the Sukhumvit Line in Bangkok is surrounded by trees, shade and other foliage, which urban planners use to reduce heat absorption and lower temperatures.

Photo courtesy FredFroese, courtesy iStockphoto

One of the things APHA has done, which is really pathbreaking and exciting, is they provided competitive grants to their state partners who then in turn provide sub-grants, small grants to community-based health groups.

That's super important, because they already look to APHA for guidance on policy, but this gives them the ability to fund local programs that address heat risk, for example, and we're hoping in our next cohort of 20 cities to expand funding for that substantially.

What are some resources or tools available for cities or municipalities?

One of the most important steps has been to develop a complete national database of all of the policies and regulations and ordinances related to smart surfaces.

For the first time with our partners, we aggregated that. We're fortunate in getting the help of the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance. They provided 30 volunteer lawyers around the country, so now we have that data for all 50 states and the 300 largest cities. That is now publicly available.

The Cities for Smart Surfaces Project is wrapping up — how do you see this work evolving?

We're now in the city adoption phase. That will continue for more than six months. We had 14 cities — new big cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, Albuquerque — send us letters of intent saying, “Hey, we want to do the same thing. We want to protect our citizens. We want to cool our cities. We want to reduce our climate footprint.”

What's really exciting is that cities have seen the benefits. They are really keen to participate in the next round, which is another 20 metro areas and cities, so impacting around 85 million people.

We can give them the technical support for those cities to be able to control their future, to be able to say, “The world's getting hotter, we're going to make our city cooler.”

What is your takeaway from the project?

A lot of cities are facing this really big problem, which is that people don't want to live in a city that's too hot to be outdoors. We need to make sure our cities stay livable and safe and people want to move here and want to work here. Because if you don't do that, and young people don't want to live there and companies don't want to invest, your city's future is at risk.

For more information on the benefits of smart surfaces, visit www.smartsurfacescoalition.org.

This interview has been edited for length, style and clarity.