A community-led pilot for cooler, safer communities in East York Don Valley cluster in Toronto
Toronto's high-rise tower neighbourhoods face a growing extreme heat risk and the standard tools we use to measure that risk often miss what residents actually experience indoors. Sprout Climate is partnering with TNO (The Neighbourhood Organization) and the East York–Don Valley (EYDV) Cluster to pilot a different approach: one that starts with residents, works at the scale of individual buildings, and turns a new city bylaw into a practical opportunity for community resilience.
The project
Anchored at the Thorncliffe Park Community Hub, this pilot co-designs and tests a heat intervention with the people who live with extreme heat every summer, particularly residents of the neighbourhood's aging high-rise towers and other equity-deserving populations who are disproportionately exposed.
Running from early August to October 2026, the project moves through six phases: from foundational research and a building-by-building compliance audit, through co-design sessions and intervention testing, to a final report and spatial mapping of heat vulnerability and cooling assets across EYDV.
Why this approach is different
Most heat vulnerability assessments rely on satellite-derived land surface temperature (LST) and neighbourhood-scale statistics. We treat both as insufficient:
- LST isn't lived experience. Surface temperature diverges most from what people actually feel in exactly the kind of dense, high-rise, three-dimensional environments found in EYDW. We ground our analysis in human thermal comfort instead.
- Buildings, not census tracts. Composite heat vulnerability indices at the neighbourhood scale flatten out the differences that matter most which produces unreliable results. We assess risk and readiness at the level of individual buildings.
- Residents are the experts. Thorncliffe Park has a documented history of planning processes that excluded the people they were meant to serve. Our co-design process is built to do better where residents help shape the interventions from the start.