Passive Urban Cooling
Transform sweltering streetscapes into resilient, comfortable microclimates without relying on mechanical air conditioning. Master the physics of urban canyon geometry, high-albedo materials, tree canopy dynamics, and natural ventilation corridors.
Like Duolingo, but for Passive Urban Cooling. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
21 levels across 3 sections, about 42 minutes end to end, roughly 8 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Immediate Interventions at Street Level, Geometry and Building Envelopes, and Macro Airflow and Systems Integration. It assumes you already know the basics.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Passive Urban Cooling
- Solar reflectance bounces direct incoming solar rays away before heating occurs
- Thermal emittance radiates absorbed heat outward rather than storing it
- A high Solar Reflectance Index requires both high reflectance and high emittance
- Reflected shortwave radiation hits human bodies directly, raising mean radiant temperature
- Cool pavements decrease surface heat while potentially increasing human thermal discomfort
- High-albedo pavements require vertical shade to prevent lateral and upward radiative loading
- Permeable pavements cool via latent heat flux driven by evaporating internal moisture
- Dry porous voids trap stagnant air and lose their cooling advantage over standard asphalt
- Subterranean moisture or storm storage is required to sustain pavement evaporative cooling
- Diffuse reflective coatings scatter light into adjacent building facades and street-level pedestrians
- Retroreflective treatments bounce solar rays back along the incident path toward the sky
- Narrow street canyons trap scattered diffuse radiation through mutual building inter-reflections
- Continuous unshaded asphalt parking lots create massive localized thermal hot spots
- Transit boarding zones and rights-of-way concentrate vulnerable pedestrians on dark pavement
- Low-emissivity rooftops reduce indoor air conditioning demand but have negligible direct ground-level pedestrian impact
- High LAI blocks daytime solar radiation but traps outgoing longwave radiation at night.
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Passive Urban Cooling the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
What role does thermal emittance play when a street surface absorbs sunlight?
Get it right to open this lesson and 20 more in the app.
Where Passive Urban Cooling takes you
- 1
Immediate Interventions at Street Level
- Tuning Street Surfaces and Albedo
- Deploying Urban Tree Canopy
- 2
Geometry and Building Envelopes
- Shaping the Urban Canyon
- Designing Passive Building Skins
- 3
Macro Airflow and Systems Integration
- Channeling Urban Wind Corridors
- Integrating Blue Infrastructure
- Diagnosing and Modeling Microclimates
3 sections · 7 units · 21 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Passive Urban Cooling is taught in the The Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start Passive Urban Cooling today.
Download Tomo, search Passive Urban Cooling, and play your first lesson in under a minute.