At one o'clock on a July afternoon, the paving in the middle of the square measures fifty-one degrees.1 The air in the shade of the kiosk at its edge is twenty-nine. The difference is not just a number. You can see it in where people are: lined up along the strip of shadow under the kiosk awning, like birds on a wire, while the plaza itself stands empty.
Squares like this were designed in the 1970s and 80s to be open and flexible. Nothing fixed, so that anything could happen: a market, a protest, a fair. The result, much of the year, is that nothing does. Trees were thought to get in the way. Benches attracted the wrong people. Water was expensive to maintain.
“A square without shade is a square that only works for twenty days a year.”
The heat makes this pattern harder to ignore. Across the city, the hottest public spaces tend to be the hardest ones, and the hardest ones tend to be in neighbourhoods with the fewest private gardens.2 Shade, in other words, is unevenly shared, and it follows money.
Cheap fixes, slow trees
The quick answers are sails, pergolas and misting posts. They work, and they look temporary because they are. The slow answer is trees, which need soil, which means breaking up the concrete that was poured over everything. A tree planted this year will cast useful shade in fifteen. That is roughly the time it takes a city to decide where to plant one.
On the way out, I measure the bench under the only tree on the square. Twenty-seven degrees. Someone is asleep on it.