Uploaded on 2015-12-14 by ValerieDH

Picture taken from Google Streetview: Antwerp Belgium, City Center ![enter image description here][2] Picture taken from Google Streetview: Kalmthout Belgium, Village Question 2: Belgium is a country with very little exclusively rural area. It’s one of its biggest urban planning failures. Belgium has a few big cities, which are all connected to each other through a long concatenation of houses and some villages. We don’t know vast rural areas as many other countries do. That’s why urban heat island effects in Belgium are much less explicit than in for example the United States. This we can clearly see on the two graphics below during a day in december. The first one is the one from Antwerp, the city I live in, the second one from Kalmthout, which is considered to be a more rural (if that’s even possible in Belgium) area in Antwerp’s surroundings. As we can see there isn’t a big difference between them both, they are more or less the same. ![enter image description here][3] Image taken from www.meteovista.be: temperatures and weather in the city of Antwerp during some days in December ![enter image description here][4] Image taken from www.meteovista.be: temperatures and weather in the village of Kalmthout during some days in December In summer then, the temperature differences between urban and rural areas in the Antwerp region, where I live, range between 0-4°C: significant, especially at night, but not as overwhelming as in America, due to Belgium’s very particular building configuration as explained before. These results are results from measurements during the summer of 2013 taken by the ‘Urban Climate Service Center’, part of the Flemish Research & Technology Organisation VITO. (http://www.urban-climate.be/) ![enter image description here][5] Image taken from http://www.urban-climate.be/ Comparing the two pictures I’ve taken from Google Streetview, the main difference is of course the presence of concrete, bricks and buildings. Much more present in the city area and thus much more influence there on radiation and wind that ‘trap’ the heat in the city and make it stay there. Apart from that a lot more waste heat originating from houses, cars and the many industrial buildings in the port of Antwerp, add even more heat to this area. Thirdly, Antwerp is a very car-oriented city, resulting in very high polluting and warming emissions. Question 3: *Stimulating the installation of more green spaces throughout the whole city. Not only by turning more concrete space into parks, but also by stimulating people to grow plants on the walls and roofs of their houses. Plants have a cooling effect due to their evapotranspiration powers. *Increasing the presence of flowing water in the city as cooling water is less likely to heat. *Inform people more of the effects their behaviour can have on their surroundings. *Stimulate the use of lighter coloured or even reflecting building materials for roofs, walls, pavements, … *Stimulate the use of bikes and public transport and creating more areas for them to navigate safely through the city. That way people are more likely to use these over a car and thus less polluted and warm gases are emitted in the city air. Question 4: Here in Antwerp, the current city council doesn’t place all things environment very high on their agenda. A lot of the many studies and new ideas that are arousing, originate from the people themselves, with a lot of bottom-up movements happening. The study I referred to in the first part of my answer, was however submitted by the City of Antwerp, which shows they are at least aware of the existence of urban heat islands. Concrete implementations into the city’s policy however, I wasn’t able to find… One bottom-up project that’s very much alive and at the moment a very hot topic in Antwerp is ‘Ringland’ though! It is a project aiming to, to put it very simple, build a roof on top of the ring roads surrounding Antwerp. That way, much needed green space can be grown on top of these roofs, the polluted air coming from the cars can be filtered before exiting this then newly built tunnel and cars don’t dominate the streets as much as at the moment. All the information can be found here: http://www.ringland.be/. Now the only thing remaining is to convince the council that this is a step in the right direction. [1]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14500998418195277.jpg [2]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14500998814119651.jpg [3]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14501000111336789.jpg [4]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14501001139410381.jpg [5]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14501001715015286.jpg