Visit the main page for the ‘Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab’ for more current information here
Pilot 2026/27: Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab
At Pedestrian Space, we are developing the ‘Sustainable Urbanism & Planetary Health’ program and curriculum, with activities piloting in 2026 with collaborators in cities worldwide.
As part of this program, we are expanding our outreach and engagement with a pilot focused on the topic and issue of URBAN HEAT.
We welcome diverse forms of collaboration for this pilot, including with students, municipalities, educators, researchers, fellow organizations, and more.
The ‘Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab’ is an initiative by Pedestrian Space supporting interdisciplinary research, awareness-shaping, and media creation regarding urban heat mitigation and adaptation.
We announced this pilot on LinkedIn on July 22, 2026, here, and were impressed by the flood of responses, which also illustrates how critical and widespread the issue is. Many university students, scholars, and professionals have written to collaborate and participate, conveying, I believe, the great interest and commitment that people specializing in urban issues have for this critical issue.
Due to such a tremendous response, as well as the reality that we are an NGO and platform focused on the intersection of media, research, communication and public engagement, for this pilot, we are planning a network approach and a ‘Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab’.
The network in development as of August 30, 2026.
Turquoise circled stars represent academic interns/placements, and yellow circled stars represent professionals/collaborators
The Lab includes, but is not limited to:
- Documenting municipal barriers, insights, and strategies for mitigating and reducing urban heat
- Community-engaged research and projects that document the lived experiences and observations of residents adapting to urban heat
- Media outreach and public engagement in shaping awareness on issues of urban heat
- Co-creation of activities and exercises for educators to engage students in co-learning on issues of urban heat
- Academic internships on diverse issues of urban heat
- Case studies of cities and regions
View content from the Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab here
We welcome collaborators from around the world, understanding the issue of urban heat as one of escalating urgency, affecting environmental and ecological health, public health, migration of species (including humans), daily quality of life, and increasingly testing the viability of our ‘habitats’.
We also host academic interns at Pedestrian Space and have been in the process, between July and August 2027 of accepting many students globally from diverse disciplines for Urban Heat-related internships and to study a range of issues of urban resilience via different disciplinary lenses.
Additionally, the academic experience of this project is not limited to academic placement but also includes an interdisciplinary workshop that we offer to facilitate via guest lectureships at universities.
If you are interested in learning more, please email us at info@pedestrianspace.org
-Annika, Founder at Pedestrian Space
The first cohort of the International Internship Network includes undergraduate and graduate students from cities and countries all over the world, and the network experience is designed to allow for independent inquiries and projects as well as collaboration at local, regional, and international levels with other Urban Heat Media Lab academic interns.
Please visit the main ‘Global URBAN HEAT Media Lab’ page for updated content: