Thermally comfortable urban environments

More than half the world population lives in cities, and that proportion is increasing. However, cities are becoming more climatically inhospitable environments because of two anthropogenic phenomena: global climate change (e.g. Seneviratne et al. 2012) and urban heat island intensification (e.g. Watkins et al. 2007; Chow et al. 2012; Mishra et al. 2015). The World Meteorological Organization (2015) has reported that