Cooler, Healthier Cities: Urban Physics for Multi-Scale Climate Solutions

You are cordially invited to attend the lecture by Flora Li Haiwei:

Date: 2 Oct 2026
Time: 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4, LT427

Cooler, Healthier Cities: Urban Physics for Multi-Scale Climate Solutions

Urban overheating is becoming a compounding climate, energy, and public-health challenge, particularly in dense cities where rising temperatures, urbanisation, and growing cooling demand intensify human heat exposure. Yet existing solutions remain fragmented across scales and are often constrained by spatial limitations, energy intensity, and unequal access to cooling. This seminar examines how physical processes in the built environment can be translated into actionable climate solutions across materials, buildings, urban environments, and human exposure.

The research first reveals the physical mechanisms underlying nature-based cooling, including radiative shading, evapotranspiration, and airflow, and examines how their interactions govern cooling performance across diverse climatic and urban contexts.

These principles are then abstracted and translated into nature-inspired porous materials, where capillary water transport and phase-change heat removal reproduce key functions of vegetation. The approach is further extended through passive housing retrofits and full-scale urban prototypes, connecting physical performance with human heat exposure and health. The seminar also explores health-driven climate strategies to advance equitable cooling in the context of hot-humid Singapore. Across these applications, the work asks how much cooling can be achieved, where, when, and for whom it is effective, and whether physical cooling translates into meaningful heat relief for those most in need.

Dr Flora Haiwei Li is a Research Associate in Sustainable Design at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge CARES. Her research lies at the intersection of urban physics, climate adaptation, and public health. Her interdisciplinary work integrates physics-based and data-driven approaches to translate evidence into material innovation, architectural design, urban planning, and policy for climate-resilient, healthy, and equitable built environments.

Flora received her PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge as a Cambridge Trust Scholar. She won the Cambridge Department of Architecture’s Best PhD Presentation Award for her doctoral research on nature-inspired solutions for urban heat adaptation. She holds a Master of Science in Integrated Building Systems from ETH Zürich and a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in Building Services Engineering from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.