What is Urban Heat Island

This chapter applies a design-based approach to integrate the innovative greenery measures in a high-density unplanned area of Imbaba to mitigate the urban heat island (UHI) effect and provide high quality open spaces by creating a chain of cooling public spaces called “Takeeba.” The literature review was applied to propagate the formulation of the research problems and identify the boundaries of knowledge. Land surface temperature (LST), the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) were mapped using remote sensing to identify the hotspots and the existence of greenery and vacant lands for intervention. Prioritizing the hotspots shows vacant land and parking lots are the hottest spots due to direct exposure to solar radiation and heavily compacted areas in the centre of Imbaba. To tackle UHI in the whole Greater Cairo, the replicability of the idea was considered in a follow-up project.