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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

Some southern cities in Europe like Barcelona have historical city centers with really narrow streets (enough to walk but no more) with tall buildings. This allows those streets to almost never directly receive sunlight. It's so impressively effective that you can sometimes even feel cold in summer, and in very hot days, heat doesn't accumulate.

http://hdr-photographer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/barce...

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That cooler temperature has got to be compounded by the lack of cars pumping out heat as well. But I wonder how such a design would handle large snow falls. Old northern cities in Europe don't seem as compact.

Older parts of northern cities can be very compact. Never heard of snow being a problem there, they probably just use smaller plowers.

Yeah--my car has an outside air temp thermometer. Big streets are a few degrees warmer than small streets. The only reasonable cause I can see is the heat is coming from the other cars. (Note that this isn't even in heavy traffic.)

It's also the heat from the sun warming the asphalt/tarmac/concrete and that heat warming the air (which will continue long into the night -- "urban heat island" is I believe the name for the effect).

In the Phoenix metro, we moved to an area farther away from downtown that has more nature (there are large parks on two sides of our house). The temperature is regularly 5 degrees cooler here.

Sounds like the urban heat island effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island

Barcelona is not a humid place in the summer, this wouldn't be as effective in humid places where shade doesn't effect temperatures as much

It's pretty humid at least compared to other cities in Spain like Toledo.

But yeah, being in the shade doesn't help that much either as the temperature is still high (and even remains high at night).

Construction like this is now mostly illegal in the United States.

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