Urban Climate Tools is a public catalog of climate-adaptation tools and city case studies across six continents. Every tool and case study is a single Markdown file, and the whole site (listings, counts, maps, search) is generated from those files.
Case Study
Urban Climate Tools
A searchable catalog of free and open-source urban climate-adaptation tools and real city case studies, built for planners, researchers and practitioners.
- Role
- Design, content & development
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- Live
Practical tools for urban heat, flooding and green infrastructure exist, but they are scattered across academic portals, NGO pages and city websites. Planners and practitioners have no single place to find what is available, what it costs, and where it has actually been used.
A static, typed content catalog: tools and city case studies are modelled as two Zod-validated collections, with filtering, full-text search and per-city maps layered on top. Adding a new entry means adding one Markdown file.
Astro · Tailwind CSS · MDX · Pagefind · Leaflet · Zod · Cloudflare Pages
Architecture
System Flow
Content lives in two Astro content collections (tools, case studies) validated by a Zod schema at build time. Counts, category lists and continent breakdowns are derived from the collections rather than hand-maintained, so the data has one source of truth. The site builds to static HTML, Pagefind indexes it for client-side search, and Leaflet renders the case-study maps.
Learnings
What This Work Sharpened
- Deriving every count and listing from the content collections removes a whole class of stale-number bugs
- A strict content schema makes contributing trivial and catches missing fields at build time instead of in production
- Static output plus Pagefind gives fast full-text search with no backend to run