Cool Forest: A Designed Experiment for Urban Climate Adaptation and Heat Mitigation

Urban greenspaces, natural and designed, present an opportunity to engage the public on topics of biodiversity and the benefits we, as people, derive from these landscapes. Cool Forest is a demonstration project and designed experiment that examines how urban vegetation can be reconceived as atmospheric infrastructure that supports biodiversity, mitigates heat, and enhances multispecies well-being. As a living laboratory, it visualizes the thermodynamic, ecological, and atmospheric processes through which trees reshape urban climates and enable more-than-human forms of urban life.

The project integrates climate-adapted planting design with a bespoke environmental sensing network to examine how the reciprocal exchanges between trees, air, and built surfaces can be designed. A dense matrix of future climate adapted species was paired with a distributed microclimate network and sap flux sensor network that measure air temperature, humidity, heat index, soil moisture and temperature, and transpiration rates. These measurements reveal the canopy as an intensive microclimatic engine that operates through shading, evapotranspiration, particulate interception, and moisture exchange, while also providing a test bed for assessing climate adaptation and stress response by native and future climate adapted tree species. By translating these exchanges into visible, legible data interfaces, Cool Forest renders ecological processes perceptible to the public and reframes trees as active design agents of urban sensing, regulation, and multispecies habitat formation.

Cool Forest situates vegetation not as passive green space but as a cybernetic, relational infrastructure through which biotic and abiotic processes co-produce urban environmental quality. This perspective aligns with emerging design approaches in landscape architecture and urban ecology that emphasize gradients, flows, and interdependence rather than discrete objects. Cool Forest illustrates how integrating sensing technologies with living systems can support biodiversity-positive urban design and transformation, demonstrating pathways toward designing cities that register, regulate, and adapt their own atmospheres. It proposes a shift from infrastructure imposed upon nature to infrastructure as nature, one that is distributed, inclusive, and capable of sustaining human and non-human life in a warming world.