Urban Cooling

No.13469119 ViewReplyOriginalReport
A Saudi gives you a dump truck of money and asks you to design a city for his country, and make it comfortable to walk around in the street no matter the sun. What do you do?
This isn't a thread about muh global warming, it's a thread about the urban heat island effect.

I would build rows of towers running east-west, and have shiny aluminumized fabric running between the towers to shade the streets and lowrise buildings below.

I would have narrow, car-free streets so the towers can be only a few feet taller than the tops of the low rises, and use light rail to move people. Parking garages would be located outside the city instead of inside them, and people would rent stalls for their cars and use them when traveling outside the city.

All buildings would be statutorily limited to being low-rises, and have aluminumized awnings covering their rooves. For the air conditioners on the rooves, they will vent their heat collected from inside the low rise into a looping channel that is itself cooled by a large industrial ammonia air conditioner, and then vent that heat up a dedicated draft tower which doubles as a vent for any ammonia leaks.

The advantages of this are that you don't have to paint asphalt roads with high albedo treatments that cost $20k per lane-mile, you don't have to have "green rooves" you don't have to mandate cladding for buildings, you don't have to spend billions on freeway networks, and much more.