Beating excessive urban heat calls for a whole-system approach, where several individual mitigation measures have to be implemented together. We assess the use of green walls, green roofs, reflective roofs, thermally efficient buildings, high-efficiency indoor cooling, urban forestry, evaporative pavement, and constructed shade for directly reducing urban heat or indirectly reducing emissions of anthropogenic heat. An ITE-index is proposed to evaluate investment (I), time for implementation (T), and effectiveness (E) of 247 multi-measure solution sets and the 8 individual measures. Solution sets comprising 4-7 different measures are found to have a higher index score and to be more effective for different types of local climate. The ITE-index is a universally useful tool for decision-making for individual cities.