Water centric urban typologies to cool western Sydney

About This Project

The vision of the Western Parkland City is for ‘a city in its landscape’. A city that is restorative and regenerative, restoring ecological and hydrological systems to ensure they are sustainable. The creation of the Western Sydney Parkland City is happening with aims of moving beyond business as usual to realise integrated solutions to urban heat and water.

Adding water and vegetation reduces temperatures in cities. This cooling effect can be modelled at a range of scales through spatial urban heat analysis.

Mosaic Insights provided strategic evidence to Sydney Water, using spatial information, meteorological data and future climate data, to support a water sensitive approach to development in the South Creek catchment. We can demonstrate the benefits of a water sensitive approach – a cooler, greener infinitely more liveable urban environment and healthier creek environment.

Our method uses spatial urban heat modelling to determine the air temperature, land surface temperature and a measure of human thermal comfort. This enables us to quantify the benefit in urban areas when vegetation and water is incorporated into the landscape and understand how they can build resilience to the future climate.