From eviction to cooling: Why the governance of informal settlements is becoming part of urban climate strategy

From “Demolition” to “Cooling,” Urban Renewal Is Entering the Era of Climate Governance

For a long time, the demolition of informal settlements has usually been discussed within two narratives: one is social governance, and the other is land development. The former emphasizes order, property rights, and public services; the latter emphasizes value release, functional replacement, and the renewal of the urban landscape. A recent study published in npj Environmental Social Sciences brings a third dimension to the forefront: the thermal environment.

Rather than settling for the empirical question of “whether it gets cooler after demolition,” this study tries to identify causal effects using a difference-in-differences method. Using Landsat thermal infrared imagery from 2002 to 2022, the researchers tracked 77 demolished informal settlements and 584 control sites in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. The conclusion was that land surface temperature dropped significantly after demolition: about 3.04±0.37 K in Beijing, 1.09±0.27 K in Shanghai, and 1.23±0.36 K in Guangzhou, all statistically significant.

These results matter not only because they “prove cooling.” More importantly, they show that urban renewal is no longer just a form of land redevelopment, but is becoming part of the urban climate adaptation toolkit. For the world’s megacities, this signals an emerging strategic shift: spatial governance, population governance, and climate governance can no longer be separated from one another.

Why This Matters: Urban Heat Is Rewriting the Logic of Renewal

The urban heat island is not an abstract environmental issue, but a quintessential problem of urban civilization. It involves building density, surface materials, ventilation structure, green space distribution, population exposure, and infrastructure resilience. In the past, many cities understood heat mitigation as adding greenery, promoting cool roofs, increasing shading, or making piecemeal sponge-city repairs on specific parcels. But this study suggests that the city’s most basic spatial structure may itself determine the boundaries of the thermal environment.

Informal settlements are especially prone to becoming “high-pressure zones” for heat because of their high density, low-rise form, poor ventilation, and lack of greenery. The study reviews this in its introduction: narrow alleys suppress air movement, simple roofs absorb heat significantly, and the absence of trees and continuous green space exacerbates surface warming. In other words, heat is not an incidental issue, but the result of spatial form.

This also explains why demolition is being reinterpreted. In the past, demolition was often seen as a forceful transformation of low-income residents’ living space. Today, amid frequent heat waves and the normalization of extreme heat, it is also being incorporated into the policy package for urban heat management. For policymakers, the question is no longer simply “whether to demolish,” but “whether demolition really improves urban heat exposure, and by how much.”

The Significance of Causal Identification: Urban Studies Are Moving from Correlation to Policy Actionability

What makes this study most noteworthy is not the conclusion itself, but its methodological stance.Previously, research on demolition and surface temperature often relied on before-and-after comparisons or cross-sectional comparisons. The problem is that these methods make it hard to distinguish whether temperature changes come from the demolition itself, or from overall urban expansion, climate fluctuations, concurrently advancing policy changes, or even locational differences in the parcels themselves.

This is not an academic detail, but a core challenge in urban governance. The greatest fear in urban policy is not “no effect,” but mistaking background trends for policy effects, or burying policy effects in background changes. Without causal identification, urban renewal is hard to move from empiricism toward a replicable governance approach.

Therefore, the value of this study lies in the fact that it pulls urban renewal out of the narrative of being “visually tidier” or “statistically more advanced,” and brings it closer to a stricter question: did a certain spatial intervention really change the thermal environment, by how much, in which cities was it more pronounced, and why?

The different degrees of cooling in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou also suggest to us that the climate benefits of urban renewal are not universal, but are deeply affected by urban form, land development intensity, preexisting spatial structure, and regional climate conditions. In other words, urban renewal is not a template that can be mechanically copied, but a strategic project that needs to be embedded in local spatial logic.

The same question from a global perspective: informal settlements are not “marginal spaces,” but key interfaces of the urban system

More than 1 billion people worldwide live in informal settlements. Whether it is a favela in Brazil, a kampong in Indonesia, or an urban village in China’s major cities, these are not exceptions at the edge of the city, but structural products of rapid urbanization.

In many cities of the Global South, such spaces accommodate large numbers of laborers, renters, and new migrants, and are an important buffer that allows the urban economy to operate at low cost. In China, they are closely entangled with the land system, household registration system, industrial layout, and the pace of urban expansion. They are both a reflection of spatial inequality and part of urban resilience.

This means that demolishing informal settlements has never been just a matter of local land renewal. It actually touches on a deeper issue in the relationship between cities and the state: in megacities with high density and rapid transformation, who has the power to reorganize space, who bears the cost of transformation, and who benefits from the new spatial order.

When demolition is proven to have a cooling effect, it is no longer merely an administrative move to “clean up problematic neighborhoods,” but may become an intersection of urban climate governance and land restructuring. This intersection is becoming increasingly important in many cities.

This also explains why the traditional logic of urban development is losing effectiveness

Over the past two or three decades, the development logic of many cities has been built on three assumptions: first, growth comes first; second, land consolidation will automatically bring efficiency gains; third, environmental improvement can be made up for after development.But under conditions of rising climate risk, scarcer land resources, and more complex population mobility, this logic is becoming increasingly untenable. Cities can no longer simply outsource heat-environment problems to landscaping or end-of-pipe fixes, nor can they assume that any demolition or redevelopment will naturally improve public welfare. What cities need is stronger policy integration: spatial form, public health, energy load, housing affordability, and climate adaptation must all be considered together.

From this perspective, this study actually reveals a deeper trend: the criteria for evaluating urban renewal are changing. In the past, the focus was on floor-area ratio, land value, and landscape; in the future, it must also include heat exposure, ventilation efficiency, climate resilience, and social equity.

This will change the way cities compete. The megacities of the future will not only compete on their status as financial centers or the scale of their infrastructure, but also on whether they can more effectively reshape residential space in an era of extreme heat, manage heat risks, and achieve functional upgrades without magnifying social vulnerability.

Urban power structures are also changing: heat governance will become part of infrastructure politics

Urban heat governance has never been merely a technical issue; it is also an issue of power. Who is relocated first, who gets better housing alternatives, who bears the cost of temporary transition, and who benefits from post-renewal land appreciation all determine whether urban renewal is a redistribution of public interest or a tool for asset revaluation.

In this sense, the cooling effect brought by demolition cannot automatically prove policy legitimacy. On the contrary, it reminds us that once climate logic enters renewal decision-making, urban governance will need more institutional constraints. Otherwise, climate issues may simply provide a new language of justification for existing spatial restructuring.

Therefore, what city strategy departments should truly think about is not the single question of whether “demolition is effective,” but how to embed heat governance into a more complete urban renewal framework: whether there are sufficient resettlement mechanisms, whether necessary social mixing is preserved, and whether low-income groups are not transferred from one vulnerable space to another.

Looking ahead: megacities need a new renewal paradigm

The implication of this study for future urban governance is clear and restrained: urban renewal is moving from a “development-oriented” phase into a three-dimensional linkage of climate, space, and society.

For large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the thermal environment is no longer just an issue for environmental departments; it is a core governance variable directly related to residential form, industrial layout, population density, and public health. For the broader global urban system, this means that urban competition is shifting from “who grows faster” to “who can manage environmental risks in high-density societies more effectively.”

In the future, truly strategically capable cities will not merely regard informal settlements as “problem areas” to be eliminated, nor will they understand demolition as a single act of restoring order. Instead, they will place it within a whole set of spatial reorganization mechanisms: low carbon, cooling, ventilation, public services, housing rights, and land efficiency will all advance together.This is the deeper implication of this study. It is not endorsing demolition policy, but reminding us that in the age of climate change, every reorganization of urban space is a redefinition of future urban civilization.

Conclusion

The most important question in urban studies is often not whether a certain policy has a short-term effect, but what long-term trend it reveals. This study on the relationship between informal settlement demolition and urban cooling shows that urban renewal is being recoded: from governing peripheral spaces to governing heat risk; from simple land consolidation to building climate adaptation capacity; from empirical judgment to causal identification.

For mega-cities undergoing extreme heat, population mobility, and spatial restructuring, this is not a paper about demolition, but a signal about the future logic of urban governance.

Source URL

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44432-026-00009-1