The City's Fever: A Narrative Review of Urban Heat Islands from Howard's London to Global Heat Exposure
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Urban heat islands---the cities' warmth above their countrysides---moved from Howard's 1833 London climate and Mitchell's temperature of cities through Oke's city-size relation, Landsberg's urban climate, Oke's energetic basis, and Oke's street design to Voogt and Oke's thermal remote sensing, Mirzaei and Haghighat's approaches, Santamouris's cooling, Zhou's China's cities, Ward's heat waves, and Tuholske's global exposure. This article presents a narrative review of that arc's canonical line: Howard's 1833 Climate of London, Mitchell's 1961 cities, Oke's 1973 city size, Landsberg's 1981 Urban Climate, Oke's 1982 energetic basis, Oke's 1988 street design, Voogt and Oke's 2003 thermal sensing, Mirzaei and Haghighat's 2010 approaches, Santamouris's 2014 cooling cities, Zhou and colleagues's 2014 China's cities, Ward and colleagues's 2016 heat waves, and Tuholske and colleagues's 2021 global exposure. The review is organized around three themes: the island's discovery, in which the thermometer's London and the city's size relations found the phenomenon; the energetics' canon, in which the energy balance's basis, the street's design, and the urban's climate framed the physics; and the mitigation and the exposure, in which the thermal's sensing, the approaches's, the cooling's, the China's surfaces, the waves's, and the global's exposure carried the island into the adaptation's century. It is concluded that the urban heat island is the city's fever chart---and that its arc is the warmth's reading from the London's thermometers to the planet's exposure.
Authors: Revista, Zen, GEOGRAPHY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Topic: Urban Heat Island Mitigation
Subfield: Environmental Engineering
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204807232