By Rachel Dovey.

Some cities — Denver, San Francisco, Philadelphia — are turning to green roofs as a way to mitigate summer heat. Los Angeles is looking lower and darker — at light gray streets that cool the air around them.

The “cool pavement” is really a reflective, paint-like seal, and on Saturday, it was spread over Jordan Avenue in the West Fernando Valley. It’s part of a pilot program that “officials say could cut public road temperatures, cool the insides of nearby buildings, lessen air pollution and reduce the threat of deaths linked to increasingly hotter heat waves,” according to the Los Angeles Daily News.

The paper reports:

The experiment will soon be duplicated in 14 other council districts before the end of June. If successful, city officials hope to encourage manufacturers to help develop cool pavement that could be incorporated into a multimillion-dollar drive to fix a backlog of L.A.’s failing streets.

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Read the full story at Next City.