The City of Toronto recently completed a groundbreaking study of its ‘thermal comfort’ done by Buro Happold and Dialog. The work will provide valuable lessons to urban planners, developers, and other stakeholders as the country’s largest metropolitan area prepares a strategy to suitably mitigate the growing number of extreme heat days it faces in a given year.

The study will go a long way in informing Toronto’s response to heat and climate, leading eventually to the creation and implementation of new comfort guidelines included as part of a broader Heat Relief Strategy that was debuted two years ago. Toronto's City Planning Division contracted Buro Happold and Dialog to lead the study based on the former’s extensive experience with similar plans for large metro areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. 

“These are significant new kinds of guidance that city leaders everywhere need to help protect their citizens and support public health in an era of rapid climate change,” Bing Wang, a senior building physicist at Buro Happold, says of the findings. “This rigorous, analytical approach goes well beyond the very basic guidelines other cities have created to bring a data-driven approach to evaluating city conditions and the performance of interventions [...] You can see which strategies are most effective, and how to prioritize them.”

The firm says this is the first-ever comprehensive study to assess the exterior thermal comfort of a large city and urges that other cities could “emulate this approach to extend climate hazard mitigation and adaptation to places around that world.” 

Buro Happold claims it did yield some unexpected findings as a result of their effort, at times reversing some “common sense” advice that had been published in recent years by various state and municipal governments. The research, which was conducted with inputs from representatives of different Indigenous groups, will be later reflected in any updates to the city's zoning codes and development application review process. Buro Happold says its direct aim for the guidelines is to increase the use of public outdoor spaces, reduce the number of heat-related illnesses that occur each year, and improve the greater mental health and social well-being of previously afflicted communities year-round.

“While we are still very early in the process, we have already seen some rather counterintuitive findings,” Krupa Patel, senior energy analytics and sustainability engineer at Buro Happold, said of his team’s findings. “For example, adding canopies provides localized shading and can cool daytime summer temperatures, yet at night fixed shading does the opposite, actually trapping heat.”

The website for the Thermal Comfort Study can be accessed here.