As heat intensifies in cities, this digest argues that solar-powered open-air cooling shelters can play a critical role in a layered urban cooling strategy—providing resilient, low-energy relief that complements cooling centers and remains operational during power outages.

In this policy digest, we discuss UHI and its impact on communities both from a global perspective and from a highly local perspective, through a case-study of such “hot-spot” within Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—the Hunting Park neighborhood, where a heat awareness and response survey with over 600 residents was conducted in 2019 by city officials (Philadelphia Office of Sustainability 2019).

To provide insights into innovative cooling infrastructure could supplement existing policies and respond to critical gaps, we present takeaways from an urban cooling pilot launched in the Hunting Park neighborhood in 2024, which may provide lessons for larger scale deployment of community-based resilient solutions.