Recovering Street Life Through Urban Climate Control Strategies: A Design and Assessment Tool
摘要
The air temperature rise in urban areas is changing the cities’ liveability. The concept of thermal comfort extends beyond the physical boundaries of buildings as heat waves become more frequent and intense. Future sustainable urban environments must encompass buildings and their surrounding areas, serving as spaces capable of offering comfort while minimizing reliance on active energy systems. Tools like Urbankea can help improve outdoor comfort for citizens. Urbankea presents a collection of modules designed for creating urban solutions that enhance outdoor thermal comfort across various contexts. One of them is the module called “ComfyPlace,” which captures the objective of this work by performing simulation and subsequent analysis of outdoor spaces. This module facilitates simulation in any global location, incorporating parameters such as materials, climate, occupancy and technologies to evaluate and understand thermal comfort in a specific environment. A mesh is utilized for simulating outdoor urban space. This mesh is defined by the user, allowing them to set the level of details as needed. Urban elements such as covers, pavements and vegetation can be modelled, with all their properties collected in an extensive database. The user receives easily interpretable results through a calculation engine capable of receiving all defined input data. The results offered by the tool enable the user to identify the technologies required to improve outdoor comfort. In addition, it makes it possible to establish the range of operation, taking into account the key variables that will allow citizens to achieve optimal levels of comfort. Surface temperatures, and incident radiation on urban elements and people, are some of the results plotted and made available to the user of the tool. This module is of great help in planning and adapting urban space to minimize the effects of climate change. A simple and intuitive interface encourages the adoption of innovative solutions for adaptation to climate change by increasing vegetation, coverings or better-characterized pavements; putting the focus on energy efficiency and recovery of well-being on the street.