Heat stress associated with climate change is projected to cause a substantial increase in human mortality and a large reduction in workplace productivity. These risks are further amplified for urban populations because of the urban heat island. Because the majority of the world’s population is projected to live in cities, there is a pressing need to find effective solutions for the high temperature problem. Despite consensus on these heat stress impacts, urban climate agendas are still mostly restricted to carbon management which brings marginal, if any at all, heat relief to urban residents. The few municipalities that have a heat management plan in place focus more on helping individuals cope with heat stress than on actively modifying citywide microclimate. The lack of attention to local-scale heat reduction is partly a legacy of international climate policies on carbon reduction and credit attribution. Another important hindrance is the lack of actionable guidance from the scientific community to city planners on urban heat mitigation methods. A barrier to active UHI mitigation is the lack of quantitative attribution of the various contributions to UHI intensity. It is now recognized that in addition to the traditional emphasis on preparedness to cope with heat stress, these solutions should include active modifications of urban land form to reduce urban temperatures. We integrate remote sensing, climate modeling and geospatial methods to investigate the effectiveness of the commonly proposed active urban climate strategies individually and collectively, and the impacts of city morphology on urban climate and environment from an urban planning perspective. A UHI mitigation wedge strategy consisting of cool roof, street vegetation and reflective pavement has the potential to eliminate the daytime UHI plus the greenhouse gas induced warming. A better planned and configured urban landscape would provide co-benefits of both urban heat mitigation and air pollution abatement.