A collaborative research environment for community-driven urban climate resilience.
Draft 1 — May 2026
rewildingCities is an open-source platform that enables local communities to run rigorous geospatial analyses modeling climate-resilient futures for their cities. The system treats transparency as infrastructure, sovereignty as architecture, and scientific inquiry as a collaborative act.
The platform's first analytical module — urban thermal analysis — allows communities to identify heat islands, measure the cooling effect of green infrastructure, model intervention scenarios, and assess thermal equity across neighborhoods. The underlying engine is generalizable to any domain of urban environmental analysis.
This document describes the product architecture, the development phases, and the theoretical foundations informing the design.
Urban heatwaves have become the deadliest natural disaster in the United States (Habeeb et al., 2015; He et al., 2022). The tools needed to analyze, plan, and advocate for cooling infrastructure are concentrated in academic institutions and municipal agencies, creating a knowledge asymmetry that mirrors the inequities of the heat burden itself.
Existing approaches to urban sustainability analytics suffer from three systemic problems:
Centralized control. Analytical tools are typically deployed top-down — a mayor's office commissions a study, a consulting firm produces a report, and affected communities receive findings rather than participating in their creation. The National Academies noted that effective use of urban data analytics requires not just technical capacity but leadership, culture, data governance, and community trust (NAS, 2023, pp. 54-55). rewildingCities inverts this model: communities define their own research questions, run their own experiments, and interpret their own results.
Opaque methodology. Most urban analytics platforms produce results without documenting the limitations, assumptions, and data quality issues that shaped them. This creates false confidence in outputs and makes it impossible for non-experts to assess reliability. Our Envelope System addresses this by making provenance and warnings first-class citizens of every output — "the system's honesty about limitations" is infrastructure, not an afterthought.
Siloed analysis. Urban environmental challenges are interconnected — heat, housing, health, food access, transportation — but analytical tools typically address them in isolation. The NAS proceedings describe how cities like Houston, Pittsburgh, and Austin have struggled to coordinate data across departments and agencies (NAS, 2023, Ch. 2-3). rewildingCities provides a shared analytical commons where different research questions draw from the same data and the same transparent methodology.
These problems are not merely technical. They are manifestations of what Interrupting Criminalization (2025) describes as systems designed to surveil and control rather than support and empower. The communities most burdened by urban heat — low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, formerly redlined districts — are also the communities with the least access to the analytical tools that could support their advocacy.
rewildingCities is designed as participatory infrastructure: a system where the people most affected by environmental injustice have the tools to document, analyze, and advocate for change on their own terms.