Last week, I travelled to Paris and Amsterdam expecting the familiar European summer: long walks, cycling through breezy streets, and evenings that called for a light jacket. Instead, I found myself stepping into a heatwave that felt strangely familiar. As someone from Delhi, I wasn’t surprised by the temperature. What surprised me was watching cities built around walking and cycling confront a kind of heat they were never designed for.
And yet, despite the heat, what sustained itself was the active lifestyle. Whether along the Seine in Paris or beside Amsterdam’s canals, people continued to run, cycle and walk through temperatures above 35°C. But how long can cultures built around outdoor movement withstand a warming climate?
It started in Meudon, on the south-western edge of Paris, where the hills above the Seine are laced with cycling paths and the pace of life still feels unhurried. The dedicated cycling infrastructure, and the habit of running, jogging or walking, was so woven into daily life that even on a morning pushing past 30°C, at 7am, I watched joggers make their rounds, picking up bread and croissants by their fourth lap of the block. Even during last week’s heatwave, people kept moving.
In Amsterdam, the city didn’t just adjust to accommodate cyclists; it was organised around them. Bike lanes were wide and well maintained, not squeezed in as an afterthought between parked cars. Even in the heat, the streets stayed full of cyclists.
As heatwaves become longer, more frequent, and more severe, cities like Paris and Amsterdam will face a slow but fundamental pressure on the way people move through public life. When temperatures regularly hit 38°C or 40°C for days at a stretch, cycling to work stops being a lifestyle choice and becomes a health risk. Running culture, walking commutes, outdoor markets, spontaneous evening strolls, all of it gets pushed indoors or abandoned entirely.
We have already seen this happen. In parts of southern Europe, West Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, the outdoor hours have been quietly shrinking for years. People wake earlier, rest in the afternoons, and spend the bulk of the day in air-conditioned spaces. Activity becomes scheduled, deliberate, and largely screen mediated. We even practice yoga in air-conditioned spaces, let alone doing cardio and high intensity workouts under a vent.
For cities that rely so heavily on public transport, the paradox was hiding in plain sight. The metros in both Paris and Amsterdam, the very systems that could give people a climate-controlled alternative to outdoor exertion, were sweltering. Most carriages had no air conditioning and ventilation windows open a few inches at best.
And this was not about comfort. It is how I would think I would have chosen if the Delhi metro did not have any ACs. If public transport is miserable in the heat, people with cars will use them. People without cars will suffer. And the broader promise of active, low-carbon urban life, something Amsterdam has spent 50 years building and Paris has been racing to catch up on, starts to unravel.
We marvel at the urban planning some of these cities have done with their public spaces, playgrounds, the accessible drinking tap water, and the active cultures I so admired last week. But for it to sustain, investment in climate-controlled public infrastructure isn’t an option anymore. Cities now need to design not only for movement, but also for living through extreme heat.
I left Paris and Amsterdam genuinely moved by what I had seen. The ordinariness of it all, people on bikes and on foot simply living their lives outdoors. Climate change doesn’t just threaten coastlines and harvests. It threatens the everyday: the spontaneous, embodied, outdoor kind of living that makes a city feel like a place rather than just a location.
Whether Paris and Amsterdam can hold onto that culture through the decades ahead will depend not just on political will, but on whether they can make active life survivable when the planet stops cooperating. Last week, they managed it. Just about. The question is what happens when “just about” is no longer good enough.
Shrutikantha Kandali is senior communications specialist, Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC-India)
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth