Urban heat mitigation and public perception: insights from crowdsourced data

Urban overheating is a critical challenge for cities, posing risks to human health and well-being. In response, some cities implement heat mitigation strategies in public spaces to alleviate this condition, but their effectiveness depends also on public awareness. This study investigates citizens’ perception of heat mitigation strategies, focusing on urban parks, by analyzing publicly available crowdsourced comments from a digital mapping platform. Using text mining, these reviews were compared with online descriptions of these places. New York City parks served as case studies as the government provides information on their facilities, number of mapped trees, park conditions, and other features on a dedicated website. A total of 8,558 comments from 11 urban parks were analyzed. About 10% of them mentioned the presence of trees and/or greenery at these parks, indicating a perception of their role in heat mitigation. Shading, usually associated with trees, was also frequently mentioned, suggesting that people recognize tree shading as a mitigation strategy. However, the number of mapped trees in a park was not associated with the number of mentions of “trees” or “shading” in its comments. Seven parks have spray showers and two have outdoor pools as additional mitigation amenities, but only 0.1% of the comments referred to the showers, and no one cited the pools. These findings demonstrate a need for improving the communication related to available mitigation actions. Public channels, such as webpages related to these places, should highlight these strategies to increase public awareness and motivate park attendance not only for the activities offered but also for alleviating heat stress. Additionally, encouraging citizens to share their environmental perceptions on review platforms can provide valuable feedback to the public administration, contributing to a better understanding of the actual environmental conditions and to the implementation of targeted measures to enhance urban livability.