A half-day outdoor masterclass in the City of London, using walking, practical tools and discussion to explore how urban form shapes climate

Urban Climate Resilience: A Summer Time Half-Day Living Lab Master Class in the City of London

A half-day, outdoor professional master class for architects, planners, engineers, landscape professionals, and anyone interested in the climate of cities, exploring the city as climate infrastructure.

Set in the City of London, this field-based session blends walking, observation, and critical discussion, drawing on over a decade of research into how design decisions shape local climate. Grounded in place rather than classroom lectures, participants will experience how air, heat, and moisture behave in dense urban environments and reflect on how spatial design can amplify or mitigate these effects.

The format encourages interdisciplinary dialogue and shared professional learning. Suitable for both new and returning participants, it offers the opportunity to move beyond awareness and develop practical ways of embedding climate-responsive thinking into professional practice.

The walk takes place in all weather conditions. In many ways, harsher conditions make the outcomes more visible and the lessons more immediate. Sensible clothing and footwear are essential: this is not a walk in the park.

Event Description

This master class positions the City of London as a living laboratory, where built form is understood not as backdrop but as active climate infrastructure. Over one day, participants will engage with abiotic (solar access, thermal exposure, ventilation and hydrology) and biotic (vegetation health and ecological resilience) dynamics as outcomes of urban morphology and surface properties across building, street, neighbourhood, and city scales. These dynamics directly affect daily experience: unshaded streets and wind exposure heighten stress, while shaded areas, green corridors, and water bodies provide relief.

Led by Dr. Julie Futcher and Will Sandy, the session builds on over a decade of internationally established Urban Climate Walks, now developed into a structured training format. Participants will explore how geometry, density, orientation, and enclosure regulate solar access, shading, ventilation, and radiative balance, the fundamental drivers of resilience, and how these processes condition the health of biotic systems such as vegetation, biodiversity, and nature-based solutions.

Why This Matters

Current urban practice exhibits systemic gaps: Despite their importance, street-level outdoor conditions remain only partially addressed in climate adaptation efforts. Approaches to tackle these issues are often fragmented, focusing on building performance or regional-scale modelling, leaving critical microclimatic factors underexplored despite their strong influence on public wellbeing and urban resilience

Climate is treated as a background condition rather than a design parameter.

Responsibility is fragmented between agencies and disciplines.

Indoor and outdoor climates, energy and comfort, building and urban scales remain siloed.

Surface treatments and greening are privileged over structural form-based drivers.

This master class exposes these gaps, repositioning the urban landscape as active climate infrastructure and showing how design decisions at the surface, building, street, and neighbourhood scale have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.

Engaging Practitioners

Participants are not passive observers. Through guided analysis and co-production formats, professionals work directly with the Urban Climate RULES framework to:

Analyse real sites in situ and interpret how morphology modifies climate.

Identify dynamic seasonal “prevailing conditions.”

Translate observations into design briefs, planning checklists, and resilience strategies.

In this way, practitioners act not only as learners but as co-authors of applied knowledge, ensuring insights are immediately transferable to planning, mobility, and design practice.

Exploring the City Through a Climate Lens

Throughout the day, participants will explore the City of London through the lens of urban climate science, analysing how buildings, surfaces, and open spaces actively regulate air, heat, and moisture.

At each site, discussion will focus not only on immediate microclimatic effects but on the far-reaching and dynamic outcomes of design decisions, how a single choice of orientation, enclosure, or surface treatment can alter:

Thermal comfort at street level,

Ventilation opportunities across a neighbourhood,

The resilience of vegetation and biodiversity,

And the long-term energy balance of the wider urban fabric.

By treating the city as a living lab, the master class reframes morphology as a primary lever of climate-responsive design, moving beyond piecemeal surface fixes to consider how the form of the urban landscape sets the abiotic conditions that underpin biotic health, resilience, and nature-based recovery.

Description supplied by the event organiser.