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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