Collecting a fine scale of microclimate data can help to determine how physical characteristics (e.g., solar radiation, albedo, sky view factor, vegetation) contribute to human exposure to ground and air temperatures. These data also suggest how urban design strategies can reduce the negative impacts of the urban heat island effect. However, urban microclimate measurement poses substantial challenges. For example, data taken at local airports are not representative of the conditions at the neighborhood or district level because of variation in impervious surfaces, vegetation, and waste heat from vehicles and buildings. In addition, fixed weather stations cannot be deployed quickly to capture data from a heat wave. While remote sensing can provide data on land cover and ground surface temperatures, resolution and cost remain significant limitations. This paper describes the design and validation of a mobile measurement bicycle. This bicycle permits movement from space to space within a city to assess the physical and thermal properties of microclimates. The construction of the vehicle builds on investigations of the indoor thermal environment of buildings using thermal comfort carts.

Recently, climate change resilience efforts in the building sector have increased. Previous studies have examined the theoretical frameworks that have shaped the concept development of resilience. However, little is known about the theoretical approaches adopted by building professionals in their climate change resilience work. A literature review identified climate change resilience across four academic domains: ecology, engineering, disaster risk reduction, and the social sciences. To better understand how resilience is defined in the building sector, we examined eighteen climate change resilience documents developed to provide guidance to building sector professionals in the United States. Our analysis of these documents helps to understand how professionals are framing and possibly incorporating these strategies in their work, though we did not measure the adoption rate of each of the documents. We find that resilience is mostly a discourse on bouncing-back, preserving the status quo, and/or developing emergency responses to major hazards. Fewer documents incorporated an ecological or social science-based logic. This highlights the challenges of translating resilience from four academic domains into building strategies for the professional community. In closing, we discuss how competing conceptions of resilience may impact the implementation and effectiveness of climate change resilience strategies in the built environment.

Extreme temperatures claim more lives than any other weather-related event, posing escalating socio-technical and governance challenges that few urban communities have addressed in a systematic, coordinated and comprehensive way. Scholars have only recently begun to investigate the granular scales at which distributions of thermal risk are produced, people's individual subjective thermal experiences and environmental justice dimensions of the hazard. Advances in research pave the way for concomitant improvements in management and policies, but bridges are needed to connect the thermal vulnerability knowledge base with place-based protective practices that are climatically, politically and culturally appropriate. The research presented in this paper uses actor-network theory (ANT) to describe the planning phase framework of a socio-technical collaborative for managing thermal extremes. The Thermally Resilient Communities Collaborative (TRCC) is a framework for planning and test-bed design phases of a thermal management system. Drawing lessons from two case studies, the framework examines how socio-cognitive spaces for collaboration change with technical and policy disruptions, and provides a way to design experiments that test how technical and governance interventions can enable collective action around urban thermal management.