Seville is a city used to high temperatures, but its resilience has been put to the test in recent years with increasingly earlier and longer heat waves.
"During the day, still, but the nights are unbearable", was the most common phrase among the Sevillians last July, when the thermometer stagnated at 40 degrees after sunset.
The Andalusian capital has proposed to live with the effects of climate change with urban and environmental measures that allow residents to mitigate its impact.
"It is not enough to put awnings, we are in a geographical position that forces us to adopt specific actions," warns its mayor, Antonio Muñoz.
Construction materials and trees adapted to the environment, green walls, specific awning, the installation of urban fountains and the recovery of the streams and rivers that crossed the streets in their old design or the rescue of the technology that in 1992 allowed the creation of the famous microclimate of the Expo through evapotranspiration systems, are the elements with which the Seville City Council, hand in hand with the Chair of Climatic Comfort of the School of Architecture (ETSA) of the University of Seville, ceases to be one of the ovens of the Guadalquivir.
“It is a thoughtful and scientific process, which is not opportunistic, in the sense that it does not seek to immediately solve the problem, but instead aims to develop a strategy for the entire city, with solutions specifically applicable to each of its neighborhoods,
Satellite remote sensing of temperature in Seville.
/ SEVILLE CITY COUNCIL SEVILLE CITY COUNCIL
This process began a year ago with an exhaustive study to analyze through satellite the real temperatures of each street and each area of the city and their evolution throughout the day.
This scientific information was complemented with other multidisciplinary readings from experts in Engineering, Architecture, Biology, Geology and a historical approach.
A team of 40 researchers from ETSA, the School of Agronomists, the faculties of Psychology, Medicine or Biology and personnel from the Department of Parks and Gardens of the City Council work in the chair.
"It was important to know how the city has managed to adapt to heat throughout history and we have discovered texts from the 15th century, specifically one from 1418 in which Seville was already divided into zones based on temperature," he says. Peak.
“The modern city has lost many adaptive traditions that made the city adapt itself somewhat better to the temperature and it is important to recover them”, Pico insists.
In this sense, he recalls that the installation of automatic entryphones in homes has led to the loss of the habit of having the doors of houses open, which allowed the fresh air that was generated in the patios to go outside.
"In the patios the temperature is up to 15 degrees lower," says Pico.
“The sum of the recovery of that tradition and the new technology can improve the situation of citizens.
These are things that seem small, but when added together, they contribute tremendously to improving the temperature”, emphasizes Pico.
In addition to historical factors, urban morphology has also been studied, the degree or level of whiteness of the materials in each street, how the vegetation responds in each neighborhood and how technology against climate change affects heritage when it comes to Design and use different pavements, coverings or awnings.
Following this analysis, the chair has identified three areas in which to act as a pilot project to apply throughout 2023 the measures they have designed with the aim of extending them to the rest of the city in the future.
Old town, modern city and periphery
Marquee in Tetuán street, in Seville.
The chosen points also represent different urban models, each with its own idiosyncrasy, which will allow better adapting the solutions to specific spaces.
One of them is the neighborhood of San Julián, nestled in the historic center of Seville, which maintains the traditional design of narrow streets and which houses fundamental heritage landmarks such as the Almoravid wall from the 12th century.
"Here we can address a problem that the center has called the heat island effect, which makes the temperature more intense than in the periphery, especially at night, where the heat is accentuated," says Pico.
The second enclave chosen is Hytasa Avenue and the neighboring neighborhood of Amate, which is considered a consolidated city on the periphery.
There it will be possible to act in a neighborhood in a vulnerable situation —Amate is one of the most depressed in Spain.
"We are interested in studying the layout of the avenue itself and the surrounding area in order to improve its conditions," says the architect.
Finally, the Guadaíra park has been chosen, on the outskirts of Seville, which integrates the green ring of the town
"To treat the effects of heat waves, it is very important to see how residents respond based on their needs, one neighborhood does not respond like another," says Ricardo García Mira, professor of Social and Environmental Psychology at the University of A Coruña.
He highlights the importance of political action when applying strategies against climate change go hand in hand with scientific knowledge to avoid the temptation to adopt models that have been able to succeed in other cities, but that do not necessarily have to be extrapolated.
“Sometimes politicians have a greater preference for importing models that have been successful elsewhere, but are out of context.
Political action must be adapted based on how human groups work ”, he adds.
An idea shared by Pico: "This is one of the great problems of the modern city, to think that they are all the same whether we are in Stockholm or Seville, that all the bus shelters have to be the same whether they are in Barcelona or Bilbao" .
For this reason, through the measures of the pilot program, a series of indications will be offered whose specific development will depend on each of the neighborhoods to which it is applied, depending on the distribution of traffic, its solar orientation... "This implies reorienting budgets and a change in urban policies that in many cases are too established.
It means arbitrating tactical urban planning measures to make the daily life of citizens more bearable”, warns the mayor.
Among the solutions that the chair has presented is the study of trees and their shading to adapt the species to the streets and their environment and to put walls and green roofs in public buildings, preferably, but also private ones.
"The portraits of the historic city continually refer to green and water," says Pico.
The management of water in public space is another of the elements that prevail in the proposals.
Urban fountains, the installation of the evapotranspiration systems of Expo 92 —which have already been recovered in other initiatives such as the Cartuja Qanat space and which will soon be operational with the bioclimatization of the canopies, the square and the public school on Avenida de the Red Cross-,
the use of urban drainage to store and recycle rainwater or the recovery of streams and rivers that existed in the design of the ancient city.
“It is a thoughtful, worked and participatory process that has a political reflection in the administration that is going to have to develop it”, adds the director of ETSA.
Based on the results of the pilot tests, the City Council will be in charge of designing the strategies for the city.
"Seville can be the spearhead for other cities with similar characteristics and contribute to developing and nurturing good practices to fight against extreme heat," says the mayor, referring to cities such as Atenas, Monterrey, Santiago de Chile, Atenas, Miami , Melbourne and Freetown, which are part of the proMETEO project, created to develop initiatives to raise awareness about the effects of heat waves and promote public spaces with climate comfort.
You can follow CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT on
and
, or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter