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The development of modelling techniques to study the urban heat island effect by accurately evaluating solar heat gain in urban environments is presented. The modelling techniques consist of: a realistic geometrical modelling tool that reproduces real urban morphologies, a parallelized gridding algorithm that generates evenly distributed grids on urban facades, and efficient solar heat gain calculation algorithms for accelerated capturing of the solar irradiance impinging on urban surfaces. The developed techniques are validated against in-situ measurements in urban areas in Singapore with different scenarios covering a wide range of urban morphologies found across the city and various weather conditions, and applied to study solar heat gain distribution for existing and new towns. The simulation results reveal that the developed techniques are able to evaluate the effects of urban geometries, materials and tree shading on solar heat gain on urban surfaces, which provides insight into the fundamental physics applied to mitigate the urban heat island effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]