Participatory Heat Mapping for Climate-Just City Planning

James Anderson

Participatory Heat Mapping for Climate-Just City Planning

Author(s)	Dr. James Anderson
Country	United States
Abstract	Extreme urban heat is simultaneously a climatic, spatial, public-health, and distributive-justice challenge. Conventional heat maps derived from satellite observations, weather stations, land-cover characteristics, or demographic indices can identify thermally exposed locations, but they may overlook street-level experiences of heat, unequal access to cooling resources, informal mobility patterns, outdoor occupational exposure, housing inadequacy, and locations that residents themselves regard as unsafe during hot periods. This study develops a participatory heat-mapping framework for climate-just city planning by combining technical heat exposure, social vulnerability, adaptive-capacity deficits, resident-reported heat burden, and community-identified planning priorities. Because authenticated city-level environmental measurements and community-participation data were not supplied, the quantitative component is explicitly designed as a simulation-based methodological evaluation. A synthetic urban environment consisting of five planning zones and 500 neighborhood-level observations is constructed to demonstrate the proposed method. A Participatory Heat-Justice Priority Index is developed to distinguish areas that are merely thermally hot from areas where heat exposure intersects with social disadvantage and limited adaptive capacity. Simulated analysis shows that community-informed prioritization materially changes the ranking of several neighborhoods. For example, an analytically moderate-temperature housing district becomes a high-priority intervention area after resident-reported indoor overheating, limited tree shade, restricted cooling access, and pedestrian exposure are incorporated. Conversely, the hottest commercial core receives a slightly lower justice-adjusted priority because adaptive resources and access to cooling are comparatively stronger. The study argues that participatory heat mapping should complement rather than replace remote sensing and quantitative heat-vulnerability analysis. Its principal value lies in making experiential, procedural, and distributive dimensions of climate justice visible within spatial planning decisions. The proposed framework provides a reproducible foundation for prioritizing tree canopy, shade infrastructure, cooling facilities, housing retrofits, pedestrian improvements, and locally appropriate heat-adaptation investments.
Keywords	participatory heat mapping, climate justice, urban heat, participatory GIS, heat vulnerability, environmental justice, urban planning, community engagement
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 6, Issue 5, September-October 2025
Published On	2025-09-15

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Participatory Heat Mapping for Climate-Just City Planning

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