Extreme heat is becoming one of Vancouver’s fastest-growing climate challenges. Uneven access to cooling resources can place neighborhoods and communities at greater risk. While the locations for the cooling resources exist, there is a lack of meaningful data insight into which neighbourhoods require investment into cooling resources. Find Your Cool is an interactive urban planning and cooling resource finding tool that maps and scores heat vulnerability across Vancouver neighbourhoods using public data from the City of Vancouver’s Open Data Portal.
It is built for two types of users: residents who need to find cooling resources and shade fast during extreme heat, and city planners who need data to decide where to invest in new cooling infrastructure.

Find Your Cool helps residents seek immediate respite from the heat by showing and navigating them to cooling resources nearby, like water fountains, parks, community centres, and even trees. Instead of simply displaying this data, we focused on transforming it into a Cool Score overlay that ranks neighborhoods by their cooling resources relative to one another. We also allow users to adjust the Cool Score formula weights based on the resources that are most important to them. City planners can use this Cool Score to determine where to prioritize investments in cooling infrastructure.
Find Your Cool helps residents stay safe today and gives city planners the evidence to build a cooler city tomorrow!

Next Steps

We wanted City Planners to gather as much useful data as possible to make informed decisions, and we wanted locals who know their area best to provide user reports and submit feedback on cooling resources in their neighbourhoods. City planner accounts can view the reports and use them to inform their decisions alongside the cool scores.