Xuecai Zhang
Cooling Network
The design thesis mitigates the impacts of Urban Heat Island (UHI) through climate adaptation for the developing activity centres in Melbourne suburbs through integrated, multi-scalar landscape design.
The proposed design starts from the Metropolitan Melbourne scale, through careful least-cost landscape planning of green and blue infrastructure to mitigate the effects of UHI. The design combines this with the population growth rate of heat vulnerable suburbs to determine the design intervention. The landscape renovation applies climate adaptive suburb design based on the large-scale planning and analyses of specific local conditions. In the final third stage, the streets and public activity space are designed to meet the needs of the residents.
