2023 will be one of the warmest years according to meteorological monitoring. As urban agglomerations are heavily stricken by hot summer temperatures due to the Urban Heat Island effect and it is expected that this issue is going to worsen in upcoming years, different shading and cooling solutions on urban scale need to be evaluated. The present contribution presents fundamental R&D work toward artificial structures foreseen for construction in dense urban areas, where traditional (and most recommendable) means of blue-green infrastructures can not be applied onto. These structures were named as "Smart and Urban Trees" and come with a long list of questions pertaining to their planning, realization, and impact. In the project Smart and Urban Tree not only the knowledge-based design of such structures was discussed, but also the organizational and interdependent questions toward acceptance of governments and city dwellers were adressed. Thereby, the assessment of the to-be-awaited performance of these structures turned out to be of major interest. As such, different designs and concepts of such structures were subjected to different assessments. Both the shading and cooling performance implications of such structures were examined by deployment of suitable simulation instruments. This contributions illustrates the findings of the project.