Assessment of Neighborhood Urban Heat Island Resilience through Urban Fabric and Socio-economic Capacity: A Case Study on LCZ 2 Neighborhoods in Konya, Türkiye

Local Climate Zones (LCZs) provide an important framework for classifying the physical and thermal characteristics of urban areas, but they are limited in explaining the socio-economic and urban morphological differences of neighborhoods within the same LCZ class. This study aims to examine whether urban heat resilience differs in terms of socio-economic and urban fabric characteristics in neighborhoods within the same LCZ class. Accordingly, nine neighborhoods in Konya, Türkiye, classified under LCZ 2, were comparatively analyzed under low, medium, and high socio-economic capacity groups. In this study, urban heat resilience was evaluated within the framework of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity components. The climatic, socio-economic, and urban fabric indicators representing these components were normalized to create the Neighborhood Heat Resilience Index. The findings reveal substantial differences among neighborhoods within the same LCZ 2 class in terms of land surface temperature, urban fabric characteristics, and socio-economic conditions, as well as in their overall resilience scores. Neighborhoods with higher socio-economic capacity generally exhibited higher adaptive capacity scores. Furthermore, high land surface temperature alone did not necessarily correspond to low overall resilience, highlighting the importance of jointly assessing thermal conditions, urban fabric characteristics, and socio-economic capacity to understand neighborhood-level heat resilience.