To create successful, growing innovation districts, local leaders in many cities have led bold, transformative moves to re-purpose the land. In many cases, re-imagining and redeveloping the landscape, as a means to advance an innovation ecosystem, was essential because districts are often emerging in areas designed for another time and another economy. This physical re-make has often included the re-design of boulevards, which serve as a critical spine across a district—often connecting multiple nodes of activity.

For any type of community or locale, well-designed boulevards create a pronounced sense of place. They are destinations providing retail stores, restaurants, and community activities. They are people-centered streets where residents, visitors, and workers sit and linger. They are corridors where traffic is often intentionally slowed. And they are aesthetically magnetic places where the constellation of trees can create both art and architecture.

For innovation districts, well-designed boulevards can also enhance the level of connectivity among institutions, start-ups, and industry; increase the accidental collisions between people to strengthen social networks and create a “buzzing” environment; facilitate the convergence of diverse disciplines and sectors, which is needed to accelerate new waves of innovation; and create a community where a diversity of people are drawn together in magnetic, inviting, and open places.

What is often overlooked in boulevard design—as well as in the design of public plazas, open spaces, and the spaces between buildings—is that variations in climate (temperature, sun exposure, and other variables) should be taken into account in the process. What this means is that bourgeoning innovation districts in hot, dry climates—such as the Middle East, many parts of Africa, certain areas of Australia, and the American Southwest—should neither rely on, nor attempt to replicate, design principles and models developed for innovation districts in cooler and/or wetter climates.

To support the early work of an innovation district in Be’er Sheva, Israel, a city on the edge of the Negev desert, The Global Institute research team set out to find cutting-edge examples of boulevards in similar arid conditions. This narrowed the research to areas with hot, dry climates and with high levels of particulates in the air, such as sand and dust. We were particularly intrigued to conduct research on boulevard designs for arid conditions, considering that 35 percent of the world’s land surface is covered by arid lands and drylands, known as desert environments.1 This is also where over 20 percent of the world’s population, some 1.5 Billion people, face a range of complex challenges, such as the scarcity of fresh water and/or precipitation, inadequate infrastructure systems, and public health issues related to air pollution and heat.2 Clearly, climate change and its profound effects on people must be more integrated into planning and design processes.

Research reveals real work ahead to create “cooler” Boulevards

Put simply, our research failed to discover strong examples of people-centered, climate-sensitive designs for walkable streets and boulevards in arid climates. This is consistent with the findings of Gerald Mills, a climatologist, who explained that “the difficulty in applying research in urban climatology to architectural design problems may be explained by the fact that ‘despite the common interest in the urban climate, these fields pursue different research interests, employ contrasting methodologies and present results differently.” 3

Most designs for re-imagined boulevards focused extensively on creating “hip and cool places,” but a derivative effect is leaving people overexposed and overheated. Many boulevard designs in arid climates favor paved, impervious plazas, shading in only a few select areas, buildings with large reflective windows, and vast, gaping distances between buildings. The lack of shading alone translates into high levels of sun exposure, drastically reducing comfortable walk times, and discouraging any desire to stop, linger, or stay outside. These challenges are magnified when young children and the aging population are considered.

Rather than focusing on creating “cool” places, planners should give far greater priority to creating cooler micro-climates. This means exploring techniques to measurably reduce temperatures and create habitable spaces for people to meet, linger, and connect.

Our research also found that two groups of people are often not invited to contribute to boulevard design, which helps explain the disconnect. The first such group consists of planners, ecologists, and climatologists with strong backgrounds in sustainable and ecological development. The second group is the community—the people who walk along these boulevards daily and have intimate experience with what is not working, and why. These voices are absent from many developments found in arid climates.

On the positive side, the research did identify several important people- and climate-centered design principles for districts in arid climates.

  • Embrace pervious surfaces and natural vegetation: Vibrant streetscapes, which help create pleasant walking experiences, can be achieved through the use of natural materials for sidewalks and pathways. These materials can include small absorbent stones, paths adorned with vegetation, or even white-washed pavement. Dark and impervious asphalt surfaces dramatically increase temperatures because they generate significant levels of long-wave radiation (produced when the sun’s rays reflect off such surfaces). This simply means that the designers of such places should look to their natural ecology and materials to help create cooler solutions.
  • Design in nodes: “To help reduce the effects of climate, we need to have nodal development,” explained professor Evyatar Erell of the Desert Architecture and Urban Planning group at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.4 He argued that the concentration of buildings, shading elements, and vegetation significantly reduces direct sun exposure and overall temperatures. A nodal approach, which is a compact form of development, can be applied to a linear boulevard by developing areas of concentrated focus along the boulevard. This would mean creating strategic areas that have denser clustering—of trees, shading elements, buildings, or other treatments—to “hold” greater numbers of people in creatively cooled conditions.
  • Rethink the design of buildings and their connections to each other: Buildings with large overhangs create welcome areas of shade for at least part of the day and should be encouraged. Heavily glazed windows also cut down on reflection of the sun’s rays, reducing the level of sun radiation into buildings. Buildings along boulevards commonly have large glass plate windows on the ground floor and first floor, making careful treatment of windows a priority. In a suggestion complementary to the nodal development described above, researchers Mazouz and Zerouala observed that designing narrow streets to connect buildings is recommended for desert locations to reduce the level of sun exposure, even at a cost of limiting the movement of air. This is contrary to warm and humid locations, where planners should focus on increasing airflow while providing shade.5
  • Change hours of access: The use of intelligent responsive lighting—which enables luminaires to be programmed to switch on, or to change in brightness or color, depending on the time and public usage patterns—enables people to participate in activities at dusk and after dark, avoiding the hottest hours of the day.

In 1984, researcher Oke argued that what climatologists require is an “ability to demonstrate the importance of climatic information in the design of a settlement, and the predictive power to foretell the climatic impact of alternative design strategies.” 6  Today, the imperative to combine climate-focused design with innovation- and people-centered developments is paramount. Inviting input from thought-provoking researchers and practitioners, such as Evyatar Erell, and from the broader community, is the only way to get there.

1 Vatche Tchakerian and Patrick Pease, “The critical zone in desert environments,” The Developments in Early Surface Processes 19 (2015): 449–472.
2 Ibid.
3 Gerald Mills, “Progress toward sustainable settlements: A role for urban climatology,” Theoretical and Applied Climatology 84 (2016): 69–76.
4 Interview with Evyatar Erell, BGU professor, The Desert Architecture and Urban Planning Group, May 2019.
5 Rohinton Emmanuel, “A hypothetical ‘shadow umbrella’ for thermal comfort enhancement in the equatorial urban outdoors,”Architectural Science Review 36 (1993): 173–184.
6 Timothy R. Oke, “Towards a prescription for the greater use of climatic principles in settlement planning,” Energy and Buildings 7 (1984): 1–10. 1984.