Building Heat-Resilient Neighborhoods—Testing the Implementation on Buildings and in Open Spaces in Two Sample Quarters Dresden and Erfurt

Heat is one of the most serious environmental impacts of climate change and negatively affects inhabitants of densely populated urban areas. Building resilience to this natural hazard that will intensify in the future is a socially challenging knowledge-integrative process that requires adaptive capacity at multiple levels. Increasing coping capacity through adaptation measures that are as physically effective as possible, socially just and perceived as effective by citizens contributes significantly to building resilience, in the sense of the ability of actors or systems to cope with disturbances such as a severe heat load. This chapter aims to demonstrate qualitative and quantitative potential for resilience building through specific implementation measures in two sample quarters in Dresden and Erfurt as case studies. The measures described in this chapter at the levels of buildings, green spaces and open spaces have almost all already been implemented at the time of writing this chapter. Some were intended to be implemented, but were actually not realized. These adaptation measures are used to show how their effectiveness and acceptance can be evaluated. The description of the planning and implementation process of these adaptation measures shows how an optimization of effectiveness can be achieved by combining measures with the help of such evaluation methods. The prioritization in the process of selecting measures for implementation is based on the integration of inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge of the involved actors from different scientific disciplines and from practice. Drivers and obstacles are also analyzed on the basis of these implementation processes. The chapter concludes with an outlook on opportunities with regard to future implementation of measures for resilience building in urban neighborhoods that result from the learning process here.