At first, warm days draw us outside. Parks, café terraces and swimming lakes fill up. But once the temperature really climbs and the Dutch National Heat Plan comes into force, the movement reverses. Doors close, and so do curtains. If you have air conditioning or a well-insulated house, you’ll be fine indoors.
The invisible side of a heatwave
For others, staying in feels like confinement. Picture a fifth-floor flat with no garden, no air conditioning and no neighbours you know. Just as during the Covid lockdowns, it’s the most vulnerable who end up cut off. In a heatwave, older people living alone and anyone with a small social network lose their last bit of company. In winter, we do recognise this problem. Around the holidays, Christmas dinners and campaigns against loneliness pop up everywhere. In summer it stays quiet, just when the doors are closing.
During a heatwave, attention mostly goes to what can be measured. Drink enough water and keep yourself and your house cool. Useful advice, but it shows only one side of the problem. “Heat affects you physically, mentally and socially, and those effects reinforce each other”, says Thomas van Rompay, associate professor at the University of Twente. He studies how the design of our surroundings influences our wellbeing. “That accumulation is exactly what makes heat such a complex problem.”
Heat also changes our behaviour. Concentrating gets harder and tempers fray faster. And a cold beer only makes the dehydration worse. In the summer of 2026, Paris even banned drinking alcohol in the street for a while, because hospitals could no longer cope with the combination of heat and drink. A break from alcohol is always a good idea, and never more so than during a heatwave.
Green space is more than cooling
If you’re looking for somewhere cool, your feet carry you almost automatically to the park. Rightly so, because under the trees it is measurably cooler than among the concrete. The trouble is that green space isn’t shared fairly. Neighbourhoods with pricier houses generally have more parks and trees than the areas where the most vulnerable people live. And a bare patch of grass without shade makes little difference.
A park is also more than air conditioning for the city. It’s one of the few places where you can still meet someone in the cool on a hot day, free of charge. Such places are becoming scarce. The coffee corner at the supermarket has been axed, and really only the library still deliberately keeps that role alive.
No single solution
So what do we do about it? The temptation is to bet on one fix. According to Thomas, that won’t get you far. “Just adding greenery, just building heat-resilient homes or just running better information campaigns: on their own, they achieve very little. You have to tackle this problem as a whole.”
A heat-resilient city therefore works on everything at once. Think of homes that keep the heat out, green roofs, strips of greenery between buildings, and trees and water in every neighbourhood. Add cool meeting places, and public information that also names the mental and social risks.
For municipalities, that’s a devilish dilemma, because every square metre can only be used once. Do you choose cheap new housing, sustainable homes, a park or a cool meeting place? Caught between a housing shortage and an overstretched care system, heat quickly slips to the bottom of the pile, while it’s well on its way to becoming the next crisis.
Look out for each other
Meanwhile, technology can lend a hand. Think of sensors that check whether the home of an older person living alone is getting dangerously hot. Yet according to Thomas, that’s half the job at most. “Of course you should use what technology has to offer, but it’s at least as important that people in a neighbourhood know and help each other. Without that social cohesion, a sensor doesn’t solve much.”
Thomas has spent years studying what nature does for our wellbeing, and how to bring those benefits indoors. His research covers contact with real nature, most recently among older people on care farms in the RESONATE project, as well as the possibilities VR offers for bringing nature inside. During the Covid lockdowns, one study already showed that participants in a virtual nature walk felt more connected to the world around them. No substitute for real contact, but a stepping stone for anyone who can’t get out of the house.
For the rest, it mostly comes down to good old-fashioned noaberschap. That’s the eastern Dutch word for neighbours keeping a caring eye on one another. Know who lives alone in your street and knock on their door during the next heatwave. Ask how they’re holding up and whether they could use some cool air or company. It takes little effort, and it keeps out more than the heat. It keeps out the loneliest summer ever.
