Resilience for Whom? Rethinking Inclusive Design in Climate-Resilient Public Space under Extreme Heat

Abstract

Urban climate adaptation increasingly invests in climate-resilient public spaces—cooling stations, shaded parks, misting corridors, reflective streetscapes—to mitigate extreme heat. Conventional evaluation frameworks privilege thermodynamic metrics while leaving unexamined whether vulnerable populations can actually reach and use the resulting protection. This narrative review synthesizes research across architecture, urban planning, public health, environmental justice, and public affairs to argue that technical sustainability and social inclusivity operate on different registers, and that the gap between them constitutes a critical blind spot in climate resilience policy. Drawing on empirical evidence from Shanghai, Chongqing, and Portland (Oregon), the paper traces how barriers of distance, institutional exclusion, monolingual information channels, and unequal governance filter vulnerable populations out of nominally public cooling infrastructure. To address this gap, the paper proposes an Inclusive Climate-Resilience Index (ICRI) integrating four evaluative dimensions—thermal performance, spatial accessibility, social inclusion, and participatory governance—across nine indicators organized as a sequential gate model. The ICRI reframes climate resilience from a question about environmental performance to one about distributional justice. The review concludes that climate adaptation without inclusive design reproduces the inequalities that generate heat vulnerability.