Urban densification is essential to keep the green spaces surrounding Dutch cities, especially in the Randstad. The current Dutch housing stock, of which a significant portion was built during the 1960's and 1970's, lacks a flexible layer in which people in urgent need of housing can find (temporary) affordable housing. Short-stay housing, which encompasses people living somewhere for a day, up to a couple of years, could provide this flexible layer. Target groups for short-stay housing fare well by social interaction, stimulating integration into Dutch society and opening up new possibilities in their life. This social interaction can be partially provided by introducing the sharing economy into an existing neighborhood, providing sustainable options regarding ownership or mobility.

The project 'Between a Day and a Lifetime' therefore proposes an urban densification strategy in which a short-stay housing concept, based on principles of co-housing and the sharing economy, creates densification in a way that it enriches the lives of the current ánd future inhabitants.

Wind has a profound impact on the meteorological and environmental conditions in cities. And so, by understanding wind flow behaviour within the urban environment, we can use the increasingly available open data to contribute to the design of healthy cities. This Master’s thesis presents a methodology to compute urban morphological parameters and its effect on potential wind velocity. The proposed method may serve as an complementary method to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation or scaled wind tunnel tests. The research question in this thesis is: Can we use urban morphology to automatically calculate potential increase in wind velocity? To answer this, first an introduction to wind flows in the urban environment
is presented. Then, several methodologies are presented to compute the urban morphological parameters, such as the Urban Canyon, wind- or leeward facade, Angle of Attack and terrain roughness length. The method relies on the use of a Voronoidiagram, with cells describing the morphology. After, the urban morphological parameters are related to potential wind velocity through a scoring method. Using two meteorological stations inside the area of interest, the mean wind velocity is compared to the scores. The result show that both stations show a higher mean wind velocity for higher scores. However, more research is necessary to validate this outcome and a recommendation is given to compare the result of this thesis to a CFD simulation.