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
