Aim of the project is to design Vienna as one of the 100 cool Cities of the world.
Global Cooling instead of Global Warming can easily be located in the city of Vienna with a simple method. Aim is to apply cool colours in the City of Vienna to reduce CO2 and therefore be aware of social and ecologic responsibility.
This project is a highly advanced sustainable and simple design project. Through this project the urban albedos of Vienna could offset CO2.
Potential benefits will be: Offset of CO2, less smog, better attitude of life in the City of Vienna, conserving energy, saving money, (& social insurances) and reducing emission of greenhouse gases and air pollutants (Ronnen Levinson & Hashem Akbari)
It is an interdisciplinary approach of an artist and designresearcher, a scientist of geoengineering and a Viennese construction company, engaged with cool solutions for the city.

Increasing urban albedo can reduce summertime temperatures, resulting in better air quality and savings from reduced airconditioning costs. In addition, increasing urban albedo can result in less absorption of incoming solar radiation by the surface-troposphere system, countering to some extent the global scale effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Pavements and roofs typically constitute over 60% of urban surfaces (roof 20–25%, pavements about 40%). Using reflective materials, both roof and pavement
albedos can be increased by about 0.25 and 0.15, respectively, resulting in a net albedo increase for urban areas of about 0.1. On a global basis, we estimate that increasing the world-wide albedos of urban roofs and paved surfaces will induce a negative radiative forcing on the earth equivalent to offsetting about 44 Gt of CO2 emissions. At ∼$25/tonne of CO2, a 44 Gt CO2 emission offset from changing the albedo of roofs and paved surfaces is worth about $1,100 billion. Furthermore, many studies have demonstrated reductions of more than 20% in cooling costs for buildings whose rooftop albedo has been increased from 10–20% to about 60% (in the US, potential savings exceed $1 billion per year). Our estimated CO2 offsets from albedo
modifications are dependent on assumptions used in this study, but nevertheless demonstrate remarkable global cooling potentials that may be obtained from cooler roofs and pavements.
Journal: Climatic Change
Verlag Springer Netherlands
ISSN 0165-0009 (Print) 1573-1480 (Online)
Heft Volume 94, Numbers 3-4 / June 2009
DOI 10.1007/s10584-008-9515-9
pages 275-286