A new digital tool called Cool Routes has launched in Athens, offering pedestrians a way to navigate the city during heatwaves by identifying cooler paths and places offering relief from extreme temperatures.
The pilot project, which began on July 21, 2026, is a community-based “coolness map” designed to help people plan walking routes based on thermal comfort. Users can locate and share areas with shade, breezes, public fountains, water features or places suitable for a short break.
The locations appear on the map as “Cool Pins”, creating a public database of heat-relief points based on the experiences of people who move around the city every day. Citizens can also suggest new locations through social media using the hashtag #CoolRoutes.
A citizen-led response to rising urban heat
The first pilot application focuses on central Athens and relies on information collected through real-life observations from volunteers. The initial mapping effort involved participants from Greenpeace, Beak-On, HouseHub and WWF Greece.
“Cool Routes” aims to turn everyday urban experience into a shared resource, encouraging collective action rather than individual responses to increasingly frequent heatwaves.
The initiative was created in April 2026 through “Reinventing Heat: The Case of Athens,” a storytelling hackathon organized as part of the Greece Heatwave Project by Mindworks Lab, with support from the European Climate Foundation. The event was held under the auspices of the City of Athens and focused on developing ideas for helping cities adapt to extreme heat.
Using technology to adapt to heatwaves
According to the project, heatwaves are becoming a major challenge for urban areas, where temperatures can remain high throughout the day and night. The Cool Routes platform combines local knowledge with weather information to help residents identify more comfortable routes.
Kostas Lagouvardos, Research Director at the National Observatory of Athens, said that monitoring current weather conditions and heat discomfort indicators provided by the observatory’s Meteo unit can help citizens identify the hottest areas and use the Cool Routes website to plan their journeys accordingly.
The program operates under the support of the Meteo unit of the National Observatory of Athens and the Greek office of Greenpeace, while the Athens Urban Transport Organization (OASA) is also supporting the initiative’s promotion.
The project is currently being tested in Athens, with organizers planning a more comprehensive version ahead of summer 2027.
