Artists, Designers: Create Cool Spots to Address a Warming World

Budget: $80-95k

The City of Cambridge is looking for interdisciplinary teams or individual designers to create Cool Spots that provide shade and serve as places for community gathering. We're seeking projects that provide cooling for people in our warming world and use the power of design to prompt imagination, community-building, social interaction and action to address climate change in cities. Each approved project will receive a budget of $80,000 to $95,000. Apply by June 30, 2026.

Cool Spots is an initiative funded by the City of Cambridge's Participatory Budgeting program. Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a process where community members directly decide how to spend part of the City's budget to improve Cambridge. To date, the City has set aside over $10.5 million for more than 80 PB projects since 2014. Cool Spots, which was funded in the tenth cycle of PB, began in the summer of 2025 using different methods to provide shade and cooling in the city.

THE OPPORTUNITY: 

Social Justice and Replicability: Climate change is complicated to communicate; heat is invisible; and heat risk is unequally distributed across the city. The problems and the solutions around climate change go beyond any one municipality. Learning from Shade is Social Justice, Cool Spots program aims to offer site specific or replicable designs for structural shading that could be unique to one location or used in multiple neighborhoods, public spaces, parks, and streets. and by other municipalities.

Imaginative solutions: Artists are uniquely skilled at cross-disciplinary responses to complex challenges that also engage a multi-generational public. This project—part of the larger Cool Spots program—is an opportunity for artists and designers to explore imaginative solutions to the problem of heat islands throughout the city, particularly in areas with the highest risks. Because we know that social connection increases preparedness and resiliency, we are looking for solutions that combine reasons for gathering with cooling.

Sustainable and durable materials: Cool Spots is also an opportunity to identify ways in which sustainable material choices and methods of fabrication can best serve the mission of the project.

More Than Shade: Shade structures are not effective unless they are used. Cool Spots is an opportunity for artists and designers to consider how to incorporate interactive attractions in a shade structure, such as playful elements, data collection, lighting, educational messaging, or misting. Seating will be an important part of the design. This way we can provide an environment where community members can find heat relief in a space that fosters social resiliency and conversation. This PB project is intended to be a service to the community and should be framed, as such. 

BUDGET:

The budget for each commissioned artist is anticipated to be between $80,000 to $95,000. Budget is inclusive of all costs, including, but not limited to, designer’s fee, engineering, fabrication, insurance, installation, and deinstallation. If project is designed for more than one season, scope should include storage. 

TIMELINE: