Adaptation of the built environment to changing urban microclimates

Abstract

Temperatures are increasing all around the world due to climate change and are predicted to continue to rise in the future. This rise in temperature is worrying especially for urban areas around the world that already suffer from increased temperature due to the urban heat island effect. In order to adapt to these changes buildings often get outfitted with mechanical cooling, solving the temperature problems indoors but making the outdoor temperature rise even more and thereby creating a vicious cycle of increased demand for cooling and increased mechanical cooling. This research aims to search for a way to ensure indoor thermal comfort in a passive way without worsening the UHI-effect. This is done by creating an alternative design for a case study that is planned in a Dutch urban center and measuring its impact on the urban microclimate and its indoor thermal comfort performance in a future climate scenario. The alternative design is put together by designing and testing different compositions of passive measures found in the existing literature. These passive measures compositions are then analyzed by software simulation to assess their performance and the effect they may have on the urban microclimate and in turn what this changed urban microclimate means for the implementation of the passive measures. The final result is a building design that not only ensures indoor thermal comfort in current and future climate scenarios but also makes its surroundings more comfortable which in turn results into more manageable microclimate. Turning the vicious mechanical cooling circle into a passively cooled virtuous circle.