that’s just shitty city planning
People lived in hot deserts without AC or melting their skin off for thousands of years.
You maximize shade, maximize plant cover, maximize wind carrying away heat, maximize heat being reflected or radiated away. That means you implement passive cooling techniques like wind catchers or qanats, build narrow streets to shade the ground, make everything brightly colored, you have as many trees as possible, open waters for evaporative cooling etc…
You can do that in modern times too, look at Masdar city. US city planning is just completeley backwards. You can’t plop the same city that “works” in a temperate climate and expect it to work in a desert.
Asphalt heats up way beyond ambient temperature, and trees generate their own microclimate with over a dozen degrees lower air temperature, not to speak of shade. So yes, this absolutely is a consequence of car-centric city planning and our grand quest to turn the world into a parking lot
I agree to a point. But you can’t make Phoenix have a 70° day when it’s 100° outside.
But you can decrease massive stroads and add more trees and local grasses. Make walkability more comfortable with more shade. Accessible clean water. Walkable cities where commutes are shorter. Etc.
But that’s also the problem Phoenix was hoping to solve when they declined interstate highway expansion post war. They didn’t want to demolish large swaths of town to build them so they just kept widening the grid of roads they did have, in order to accommodate their ever expanding population
