The Lost Patch of Leafy Shade
Summers of Urban India
It’s not even mid May, and it feels like the typical hot summer arriving sooner.
The sun, like a giant celestial furnace burning fiercely, is baking the ground hard. Blistering heat is triggering cracks in soil as mercury shoots up. Eyes have already begun to see mirage—the shimmering pools of water on hot roads in the scorching midday heat.
People in cities have started spending most of the day inside offices, cars, or homes, hardly stepping out of their air-conditioned spaces into blazing sunshine.
This extremely hot weather literally divides the urban life into two separate parts, or rather, two different worlds that people live in.
One is an inside world, the cool one, the enclosed space with walls all around, and the other, of course, is the world outside, the hot one under the open sky, where the sun beats down.
The cooler the world inside, the hotter the world outside. The former pumps even more heat into the latter as the summer getting hotter makes ACs work harder and harder.
Big cities are literally a jungle these days—a dense concrete jungle, where countless structures including houses, shops, roads, sidewalks, parking lots, tall buildings, both residential and industrial, are constructed very close together.
In high summer, this jungle that urban dwellers live in turns into a real Urban Heat Island, a heat-trapping area much warmer than the rural areas surrounding it.
With lots of activity and lots of people, more and more heat builds up in urban areas—thanks to vehicles running on fossil fuels, factories emitting greenhouse gases, and ACs working 24/7.
Building materials such as cement, asphalt, brick, glass, and steel are usually very good at absorbing heat, causing higher temperatures in cities.
Even nighttime temperatures in these urban heat islands remain high. Such densely constructed areas block heat from rising into cold night sky. Because heat is trapped in lower levels, summer nights in cities offer little respite from the boiling heat of the day.
Trees seem to be a waste of space in an urban landscape of skyscrapers, metro lines, and multi-lane highways. They are often ruthlessly cut down to make space for development. Isn’t the development of cities just not possible with trees standing under the sun and swaying in the wind?
As cities expand, they often begin to take up significant tracts of land. Satellite images of urban areas clearly show how the green cover has shrunk and the green spots have vanished over the years—it looks like a time-lapse sequence of green turning brown, thanks to fast-growing urban sprawl.
We, the urban dwellers, are quite contradictory in our ways, aren’t we … ?
On the one hand we allow rapid development at the terrible cost of environment and fell trees for every possible reason, but on the other, we complain about cities with no green cover, heating up faster than ever and end up missing the lost patch of leafy shade.
Shubhra Atreya
Content Writer
IT Department
