What is The Future for Cities?

V. Kelly Turner, associate director and professor of urban planning and geography at UCLA's Luskin Center for Innovation, on treating extreme heat as a daily planning problem: which heat, whose body, and what a city can still redesign.
She argues that heat, in the American Meteorological Society's definition, is a process, and that a temperature is only a snapshot of it. Thermal literacy is the working knowledge of why you feel hot, why a city heats up, and how to cool down. The urban heat island, she says, is a useful caricature and a poor guide to a person standing in sun or shade.
Her concerns are unequal access to cooling, streets designed without shade, and a spectacle of record temperatures that does not change practice. Her hopes sit with thermophysiology, cooling that changes what a body has to do, public water, and heat governance that is still young enough to build with equity in mind. She frames what a household can do as agency, and she keeps the problem collective.Cities, she says, are mutable: if we built them, we can retrofit them.

(00:00) Heat is a verb
(01:54) Futures we plan for
(04:10) What thermal literacy means
(06:58) What counts as a city
(07:58) The heat island straw man
(13:04) Inequity, shade, spectacle
(16:21) Heat in ordinary days
(19:47) The three Ps of heat
(23:36) Water as a cooling tool
(26:57) Building heat governance
(31:40) Agency, not blame
(33:40) Heat exposure settings
(35:56) Cities can be redesigned
(39:17) Bridging research and policy

Pairs with episode 471

Show notes: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/
What is The Future for Cities?
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V. Kelly Turner would cool a home by night ventilation and covered windows, and she refuses to call that a private duty. Agency, she says, still sits inside a collective challenge.
The skill reduces strain on the grid and on a household bill. The responsibility for safe heat, in her framing, does not stop at the front door.
Full conversation in episode 472: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/

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V. Kelly Turner and colleagues find that a satellite map of land surface temperature is a poor guide to theheat a person feels in Civano, Tucson. Painting a street white can cool the pixel and heat the pedestrian.
The debate is on their 2022 paper in the Journal of Land Use Science. One side keeps 30 metre Landsat maps as the tool cities can actually use. The other shows how a morning snapshot, and a coat of reflective paint, can miss or worsen mean radiant temperature for the person on the street. Shade cools that person and keeps the asphalt from charging overnight, with a night-time catch when a dense canopy holds heat in.
(00:00) White streets and pedestrians
(02:46) Civano as a laboratory
(03:39) Mean radiant temperature
(06:00) A 10am satellite pass
(07:03) Walking with MaRTy
(08:46) The cool-street trap
(10:57) Shade and stored heat
(11:37) Trees that warm the night
(12:40) Which heat problem

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1747423X.2021.2015003
Shownotes: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/13/471r_more-than-surface-temperature-mitigating-thermal-exposure-inhyper-local-land-system/
Pairs with episode 472, V. Kelly Turner: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/
If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠⁠Building Better Cities book⁠⁠ or our ⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠!
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V. Kelly Turner finds optimism in a simple fact: cities are mutable. If people built a hot street, they canretrofit it, and local staff writing heat plans already know their cities. She points to the City of LA andLos Angeles County, where the people on heat action plans now know heat as well as they know their streets.Full conversation in episode 472: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠⁠Building Better Cities book⁠⁠ or our ⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠!
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V. Kelly Turner says heat is a verb. A weather-app temperature is one snapshot of an energy exchange, and a city that plans to manage heat still has to say which heat.
Air temperature, a surface, and sunlight on skin are different. She wants that distinction in everyday language and in local government.
Full conversation in episode 472: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠Building Better Cities book⁠ or our ⁠Patreon⁠!
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