Climate change, extreme heat, and outdoor thermal comfort in urban areas: Case of İzmir, Turkey

Recently, environmental problems, urban population growth, the expansion of urban areas, and climate-insensitive planning practices have significantly increased the effects of the climate crisis in urban areas. As cities’ population increases, cities’ vulnerability to disasters also increases. The negative effects of the climate crisis and global warming on both socio-economic and socio-ecological ecosystems vary at different scales. On the other hand, urbanization practices and the current spatial structure of Turkish cities reduce the resilience capacity of cities against the climate crisis and increase their vulnerability. When the environmental and social pressures of the climate crisis rise, hazards such as floods, extreme heat, and urban heat island (UHI) effects turn into disasters in cities. To prevent this, the effects of the climate crisis and the resilience capacity of existing urban structures should be well understood. This study focuses on extreme heat and the UHI effect, which is a critical socio-spatial problem. It is seen that the recent literature on climate change and extreme heat mostly focuses on UHI as an urban vulnerability and an effect of urban morphology, but previous studies partially cover morphological indicators. This study differs from many studies by relating local climate zone mapping with site-based study design and a comprehensive morphological dataset. The case study focuses on İzmir, Turkey; the relationship between outdoor temperature recordings and urban typo-morphological features is examined by using multivariate regression analysis. The findings correspond to the detection of the effective size of greening and the importance of ventilation for cooling in relatively high temperature climatic zones.