How Crochet Can Shade Cities: Deploying Community Textile Arts to Mitigate Urban Heat Island Effect

Urban Heat Island Effect is the increase in surface temperature of urban areas in comparison to suburban or rural areas due to a number of factors stemming from the relatively increased architectural, infrastructural, and urban interventions. Without the greenspace and foliage that rural areas possess, streetscapes lack the necessary shading to reduce ground temperature during warm months. While larger urban-scale projects can be undertaken to reduce the effects of UHI, such as increasing vegetated areas, increasing the reflectivity of building materials such as pavement and roofs, or installing permanent shading structures, these measures are often expensive, interruptive to the neighborhood during construction, and most importantly, most commonly initiated by local governments by a top-down approach. This research aims to investigate how local communities, specifically local textile craft communities with a focus on knitting or crochet, might approach the creation of effective, inexpensive, and beautiful shading devices that directly reflect the people who create them. Divided into four parts, the project investigates the quantifiable shading capabilities of crocheted textiles. Part I involves the creation and digitization of a variety of crocheted swatches with variations in color, pattern, and material. Materials and patterns were selected based on their popularity in crocheted communities based on the compilation of stitches and lists of easily accessible materials for crochet from a variety of online resources. Color is created in order to account for testing the variation color has in heating and shading results, which may reduce or enhance the creative potential of a crocheter making a similar project. In Part II, these swatches will go through a variety of in-person testing to test their shading capability and aesthetic properties. Part III uses the digitized swatches from Part I to simulate shading and radiation effectiveness of each pattern and material as a large-scale aggregate. These patterns will be tested on their effectiveness in both shading and heat-reducing capabilities, with existing shading device standards to be used as a guideline for effective shading. Finally, the in-person and simulated results are tested, and visualizations for future possible projects and their aesthetic qualities are produced.