Designing cooler urban spaces: The Bentway’s new report on the power of shade

Discover key insights from Sun/Shade, The Bentway’s summer 2025 initiative, which explored how design, art, and community engagement can help cities adapt to rising temperatures. This new publication highlights creative, equitable, and climate-ready strategies for building cooler, more connected public spaces.

How can we reposition shade as an essential resource in our cities?   

How can public spaces serve as first-responders to extreme heat? 

As cities grow hotter and summers stretch longer, shade is emerging as essential civic infrastructure. More than relief from the sun, it shapes how people gather, move, and experience public spaces. Toronto is warming faster than the average city, with longer, stronger, and more frequent heat waves. The summer of 2025 highlighted the challenges: seasons once defined by outdoor recreation are increasingly inhospitable. According to Toronto Public Health and Environment and Climate Change Canada, extreme heat contributes to roughly 120 premature deaths per year, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable. Adapting Toronto’s public spaces is therefore not optional—it is urgent. 

Cool by Design: The Power of Shade in Public Space presents research from The Bentway’s 2025 Sun/Shade initiative, a collaboration among artists, designers, researchers, and policymakers that builds on the City of Toronto’s Thermal Comfort Guidelines. The project explores how design, culture, and community engagement can help cities respond to heat, reframing cool public spaces as vital elements of public health and social infrastructure. 

The Bentway’s unique site beneath Toronto’s longest urban canopy, the Gardiner Expressway, serves as inspiration for the research and offers practical lessons for the city’s future, showing how artists, designers, and everyday residents can help shape a cooler, more connected urban life.

supporters

Special thanks for the invaluable contributions from artists, designers, The Bentway Sun/Shade Advisors, and community partners. Much like the public realm itself, this work relies on trust, accountability, and reciprocity.