This summer’s heatwave was the earliest, warmest and driest in Swiss history: everyone wanted shade. The moment shade arrives, people are drawn towards it – a collective need made visible, yet planners struggle to allocate such spaces in existing urban structures. Might a “social thermostat” provide the tool necessary to speed-up this process for desired urban futures?
Heat as a Collective Urban Challenge
This summer’s heatwave was likely also the mildest for future generations to come and urban areas struggle to mitigate the heat within the existing structures and processes. The urban is a social-ecological-technological system where collective demands for e.g. food, transport, and leisure shape its structure and processes. Structural dependencies, however, also lock in self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms between individual actions and system-level responses. These dependencies and feedback mechanisms have resulted in homogeneous urban structures ill-suited to absorb shocks such as heatwaves, but also torrential rainfall, floods and storms.
From Individual Actions to Systemic Change
Why would individual actions matter? Because urban transformation starts with individual decisions. Zürich’s «Asphaltknackerinnen», for example, showcase the collective impact of seemingly small and individual decisions, having helped unseal over 1000 m2.
Although such actions do not change the urban at the time and scale needed, to adapt for a changing climate, it does provide a signal that supports a reinforcing feedback between individual actions and system-level change: the City of Zurich now reimburses half the cost when homeowners take greening or unsealing measures and at a cantonal level building law already binds greening and shade into planning rules.
The Social Thermostat as a Tool for Transformation
Feedback can drive change in two ways: giving individuals feedback on the impact of their own behaviour relative to a goal motivates individual action; and once roughly a quarter of the population adopts alternative behaviours, social tipping processes and diffusion of innovation processes might draw the remaining share of the population into adopting alternative behaviours until it becomes the new normal.
A “social thermostat” could support such change by using existing marketing channels to show: 1) how far the urban system is from reaching a heat-adaptation target, and 2) how individual action moves it away or closer to this target. In this upcoming publication, we apply this dynamic to food consumption, showing how individual consumption might free up land and contribute to a more resilient food system – timely, with the upcoming Food Initiative vote this September.
Johann S. Schuur is doctoral researcher in the Chair Planning of Landscapes and Urban Systems. He has worked on urban transformation using serious games in the EU ERC Globescape project and now works on rural land-use transformation through consumer-level interventions related to the EU Horizon MOSAIC project.
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