A “Climbing Change” is a Design project which looks into ways of fighting the phenomenon of urban heat islands in cities, focusing on Vienna in Austria. The proposal is a set of tubular pieces which can be assembled into modular structures, that can then be overgrown with climbing plants.
Through this flexibility the structures can adapt to the existing public spaces to increase the amount of greenery and create additional shading without changing the exiting infrastructures of the city. Additionally this way of hacking a public space allows the solution to be upscaled throughout the city but also to other cities around the world. This is important because heat islands are felt in cities all around the world, and will only become worse with climate change. Additionally, more and more people will be affected by them as a large percentage of the population is moving to cities.
Furthermore this project also aims to show that even though urban heat islands have a big variety of causes and effects there is a ‘simple’ solution that can be implemented to ensure that something is done in the short term, rather than the long term. My structures aim to show and give hope that there is something we can do, more specifically in areas that have already been built and that have difficulties of implementing other types of greenery such as trees, which take a long time to grow and provide shade.
