Urban Heat Diagnostic.
I help council, housing, planning, public-health and built-environment teams identify where heat exposure, vulnerable populations and actionable place conditions overlap, then turn that evidence into a prioritised decision brief and map. A fixed-scope, two-week discovery service, sold and delivered under my own name.
Plans and maps exist. The decision still stalls.
Teams often have climate plans, open datasets and broad heat-risk maps, but still struggle to answer:
- 01Which neighbourhoods, estates or assets need attention first?
- 02Which population and place factors are driving the priority?
- 03Which interventions are plausible at that location and organisational scale?
- 04What evidence is strong enough to support a funding, planning or engagement decision?
- 05Where are the data gaps too important to hide?
The service does not sell another dashboard. It delivers a bounded decision and a reusable evidence base.
Teams with a heat question and a decision to make.
- Local-authority climate adaptation, planning, public-health and resilience teams
- Housing associations and estate or asset managers
- Built-environment consultancies that need a specialist spatial work package
- Business improvement districts and place partnerships
- Community or public-interest organisations with a funded heat, health or public-space question
Ten working days, bounded on purpose.
- One agreed geography or asset portfolio
- Up to three decision questions
- A short buyer interview and any relevant plans or thresholds
- Suitable open Earth-observation, land-cover, built-form, demographic, health-proxy and access data
- Optional client data, subject to a separate security and licence check
- Decision and data framing
- Source, licence and quality review
- Heat, exposure and place-condition analysis appropriate to the available evidence
- Priority-area and intervention-opportunity synthesis
- Review with the buyer before finalisation
- A concise decision brief with findings, limitations and recommended next actions
- An interactive or static map suited to the decision context
- A transparent method and data note
- A prioritised set of areas, assets or questions for further action
- A 60-minute handover and decision session
What this will not do.
The exclusions are part of the offer, not small print. A diagnostic you can trust has to be explicit about where it stops.
- No individual-level risk scoring or profiling.
- No medical, engineering, regulatory or investment advice.
- No future-climate prediction unless an agreed, defensible scenario source and method are in scope.
- No permanent data platform, mobile app or operational dashboard.
- No extensive primary fieldwork, sensors or community engagement unless separately scoped.
- No claim that correlation establishes causation.
Method proofs, in public.
The diagnostic draws on work you can inspect. Shaping Cool Cities is the scientific and methodological foundation: an urban-heat model fusing satellite, 3D-morphology, street-network and street-level sources across six European cities at 30 metre resolution, validated with spatial block cross-validation. Climate Intelligence supplies Earth-observation, spatial-risk and web-mapping components built on open, keyless data. No One Home and Twenty Years on the Lower Lea are evidence of transparent civic analysis, public communication and workshop delivery.
These are portfolio and method proofs. They are not evidence of buyer demand for this exact offer, which is why the offer starts with a problem interview rather than a proposal.
A discovery offer, honestly labelled.
This is a discovery offer being validated through problem interviews, not a finished, productised service. The scope above is the current working shape, and the interviews exist to test it against real decisions.
Have a heat, place or climate-adaptation decision that existing maps do not resolve? Book a 30-minute problem interview. If the diagnostic is not the right route, the conversation will end with a clear no-go or a more appropriate next step.