The city of Rio de Janeiro has a consolidated urban fabric, but in its North Zone there is an ongoing housing development dynamic in which houses are being replaced by multi-family buildings. In this process, permeable soil and intra-lot vegetation are lost. The objective of this study is to evaluate how much such changes influence the formation of the heat island in the study area. The method was based on a literature review and calculation of the contributions of different land covers to air heating, from which an indicator was created. The indicator was applied to three examples of land use change in two temporal scenarios, based on areas obtained in aerial photogrammetric surveys and satellite images. The results were corroborated by temperatures measured at the nearest meteorological station and showed a strong correlation with land cover.