About 

The exacerbation of climate extremes resulting from urban settings, and the responses for associated resilience to those extremes, are complex. Many of the features of cities have both reinforcing and mitigating effects on background climate conditions, with interdependencies between urban form, function, and physical processes.  However, often these interdependencies are overlooked and mythologies addressing urban climate resilience are often narrowly focused. For example, the ability to find respite from heat in air-conditioned spaces comes at a cost of increasing heat fluxes into the local urban environment. Increasing air-conditioning across cities (as places of sanctuary) will intensify heat stress in surrounding streets. How cities operate under such increasingly extreme conditions, and how resilient cities are to these extremes, are questions that need to be addressed in policy, planning, design. This cannot be achieved, however, without understanding of how urban form and function relate to urban physical processes.

This event will, therefore, explore current understanding of physical system processes in urban environments and the interaction of urban form and function with those processes; the current thinking on urban resilience to environmental extremes; and what role physics can play in addressing the expectation of increased occurrence of adverse weather events.

The event will bring leading urban physical scientists and engineers together with built environment practitioners and policy leaders, to engage in a focused exchange of ideas and information on the current and future urban climate resilience challenges. This interdisciplinary, multi-perspective, approach is an important element in developing insights into the rationale behind current drivers of urban development and where future urban development and research should be focussed.

We will discuss our current understanding of the interdependencies between cities, climates, energy, health and wellbeing (of all living things), whilst addressing the challenges of urban climate resilience. We will have an invited group of speakers to cover 3 key topics that address the urban challenges of i) urban physics, ii) engineering solutions, and iii) policy and industry perspectives, along with a discussion session on how and where physics can inform and enhance urban climate resilience.