Unraveling Urban Heat: Lessons from World’s Largest Cities on Battling Extreme Heatwaves

Paris, London, and New York are renowned for their cultural, financial, and historical significance, but each summer, they face an increasingly harsh reality of extreme heat—conditions for which they were never constructed.

These bustling cities, like many densely populated areas, experience intensified heat due to the ‘urban heat island effect.’ This phenomenon occurs as heat becomes trapped within concrete, asphalt, and glass, transforming warm days into perilous ones.

New York City, with its towering glass and steel skyscrapers, cement-encased roadways, and densely packed residential blocks, is exceptionally adept at retaining heat. It ranks among the top urban heat island effects in the United States, highlighting the thermal disparity between urban and rural environments. Annually, heat-related fatalities claim the lives of over 500 New Yorkers, a grim statistic that underscores existing racial and class inequalities.

While some residents flee to coastal or rural areas to escape the sweltering temperatures, others remain in the city, where the heat is more challenging to evade and endure. These disparate experiences are not new; in cities like London, Paris, and New York, the struggle with hot summers has long been influenced by socioeconomic disparities.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, urban dwellers devised various strategies to cope with extreme heat within densely constructed environments. Our research for the Melting Metropolis project delves into these historical heat experiences. Here, we explore some of the methods people have historically used to manage such conditions and what these strategies reveal about urban life amid rising temperatures.

London

For most historic urbanites, escaping the confines of their home provided the greatest relief from the heat. In the mid-20th century, some Londoners escaped to the roof of their apartment building to catch the cooling breezes that swirled above the city’s streets.

For many others, since the 19th century, public spaces have provided the greatest respite from heat in their homes. Londoners turned to the shade provided by trees in nearby parks, paddled in water fountains or went for cooling dips in lidos and ponds.

Historic urbanites have also tried to cope with the heat at home. In contrast to those who sought relief from the heat in public spaces, wealthier Londoners used money and technology to keep cool. In the 19th century they purchased imported ice from Norway or employed servants to operate fans.

Paris

In the heatwaves of the 19th century, Parisians also headed out in search of relief. Like Londoners, they made extensive use of the parks that urban planners embedded into the fabric of the city during the late 19th-century Haussmann-era redesign. But it was not only dense greenery that provided respite from the heat: the trees planted along the avenues of the city offered shelter from the rays of the sun on hot summer days.

Although the Seine held great potential for cooling down, bathing in its waters was banned in the middle of the 19th century. Despite the official ban, photographic records show that some Parisians in search of freshness broke the law and took the plunge.

To keep cool indoors, the more privileged 19th-century Parisians used ice imported from northern regions or collected locally during the winter and stored in ice houses until temperatures rose. Ice remained a luxury item until the late 1870s, when technological developments allowing ice to be made artificially lowered its cost and widened its accessibility.

Daily life in Paris — including in the summer — had undergone thorough transformations by the middle of the 20th century. Air conditioning began to gain momentum but some traditional ways to cool down have remained at the core of summer life: crowds continue to swarm café terraces, the banks of the Seine stay packed with people, 19th-century water fountains are still used to refill water bottles.

New York

In the 19th century, the tenements of New York City were filled with people sleeping on roofs, sweating on fire escapes, and avoiding the sweltering indoors. The wealthy simply fled the city for countryside estates. Newspapers called these seasonal migrants “heat refugees”.

When seeking outdoor relief, most 19th-century New Yorkers headed to the beach — the city is an island, after all. But by the 20th century, they were also planing block parties with plenty of ice from corner store bodegas. On occasion, they also cracked open fire hydrants — a relief strategy that has become a classic trope of New York City summers.

Future heat waves

For as long as episodes of extreme heat in cities have affected urban life, urbanites have developed ways to cope. Today, cities are taking heat more seriously when they look to the future and working towards adaptation strategies. The disastrous heatwave of 2003 served as a wake-up call in Paris, which implemented a heat plan the following year and continues to work on ways to make the city more liveable in the summer.

Central to New York’s climate resilience plans, air conditioning has become a political battleground in activists’ fight for a “right to cooling” (a bundle of legislation championed by local environmental justice organisations).

Though it can compound the problem of climate change, technologically aided cooling keeps people alive as we all find ways to weather the intensifying heat. In May 2026, the UK’s Climate Change Committee declared that the British way of life is under threat from heat.

In June, London will launch its heat plan for the capital, a first step in supporting the city and its residents to live better with extreme heat.

The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people — not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

Chloe Duteil is a postdoctoral research associate, in the school of histories, languages and cultures faculty of humanities and social sciences at the University of Liverpool.

Daniel Cumming is a postdoctoral fellow at Melting Metropolis, Queens College, CUNY.

Jon Winder is a postdoctoral research associate in history at the University of Liverpool.

This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust, grant number 225843/Z/22/Z.

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