Europe's Heatwave and Real Estate

Hitting the high 30s in Berlin this week, my mind went to Singapore.

When I interned with Keppel (Real Estate Division), my brief was to help shape their Class A+ office of the future. Keppel has built some of the most sustainable buildings in the region and manages a large asset base. For them, designing for heat and sustainability is commitment and asset strategy.

Singapore sits almost on the equator and is warming at twice the global rate. It has no choice but to engineer for heat, and it does so deliberately.

Cooling is built into the fabric of the city as an urban planning tool, the basis for long networks of underground paths and covered walkways that individual developments plug into. District cooling has become widely established, treating cooling as shared infrastructure rather than a building-by-building cost.

Singapore also aspires to be a city in nature, partly for the same reason. Greenery is treated as critical infrastructure: planting on façades and roofs, a park within a ten-minute walk of nearly every home, wind flow modelled into the planning before anything is built. All of it works to cut heat loads and local temperatures.

Most European stock was built for a different climate and anyone holding, managing, operating or building real estate in Europe needs to treat heat resilience as an asset-value question, not a nice-to-have. And urban design decisions need to pick up as well, or why are we still building squares in the middle of Berlin without any greenery around? We owe it to ourselves and our communities.


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