UrbanAIR Consortium Update: From Lived Experience to Informed Decisions

Georgia Nikolakopoulou
15 minutes ago
2 min read

What comes to mind when you hear “heat” or “air pollution”?

For some, they are minor inconveniences and discomfort. For the elderly, outdoor workers and first responders, they are a silent, severe threat to health, livelihood, and operations.

Heat and air pollution are experienced unevenly, often invisible until they reach an extreme point.

But what is this extreme point?

Is it a temperature alert on a phone? A policy pollution threshold? Or the moment someone can’t work, sleep, or breathe safely?

At UrbanAIR WP5 (Preparation of Decision Analysis for Urban Heat and Air Quality Dilemmas), we’re exploring how these definitions differ across science, policy, and lived experience, and what that means for holistic, actionable climate adaptation. Here is how:

Study 1: Mapping the lived experience (Coming Soon)

How do residents in different cities perceive and experience heat? Our large-scale, cross-city survey asks when heat feels concerning or uncertain, gathering the human side of climate extremes. Through later analysis, we’ll identify which scenarios are most concerning, confusing, or underestimated. These insights will help UrbanAIR's digital twins reflect not just the physical reality but the lived reality.

Study 2: Unravelling Priorities and Trade-offs in Adaptation (Now in Design)

When faced with extreme heat or air pollution, how do cities decide what to prioritise? We're designing a 2-part series of online, participatory workshops for Barcelona and Antwerp, using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to uncover how stakeholders, from policymakers to community representatives, weigh trade-offs between priorities such as equity, cost, effectiveness, and timeliness. Through these workshops, we aim to uncover more than just preferred strategies—we want to understand the ‘why’ behind the choices, and how priorities evolve when facing different extreme heat or air pollution scenarios.

Together, these studies aim to help the UrbanAIR framework bridge a critical gap: connecting high-resolution hazard simulation with a deeper understanding of the lived experience and informed decision-making. Our goal is to empower cities to adapt to extreme heat and air pollution through participatory, evidence-informed, and adaptive governance.

We’d love to hear from your perspective:

What heat attributes (e.g., magnitude, duration, timing) make extreme heat most concerning in your view?
Is there a gap between lived experience and planning priorities in your community?
What decision criteria should cities prioritise when evaluating adaptation strategies for extreme heat or air pollution?

Let’s discuss in the comments. 👇

#UrbanAIR #ClimateAdaptation #PublicHealth #Barcelona #Antwerp