Connecting public health with urban planning: allocating walkable cooling shelters considering older people

Morbidity and mortality due to severe heat stress are particularly problematic for older people, which emphasizes the need to consider socio-demographic factors in distributing cooling resources. However, there are limited studies to concern the ways to link public health and urban planning to distribute cooling refugees targeting the elderly population. Therefore, this study suggests a socio-spatial analysis that evaluates the distribution of urban cooling shelters in neighborhood units by considering older people and land surface temperature. The walkable distance in a minimum of 10 min was considered when evaluating adequacy in the provision of urban cooling shelters that consisted of an urban park, community cooling center, and urban forest. Residential zones were assessed regarding social factors, which were the density of the elderly population and their relative land price features in housing. Two-way ANOVA test and random forest modeling were applied to identify zones with high vulnerability and low provision of cooling shelters. This study’s results showed that resources were lacking in places, where the elderly population was high. How the socio-demographic features affected the inappropriate allocation of cooling resources was considered. This study offers insights to measure and design the adequate provision of urban cooling shelters to secure public health.