Production of Climate Responsive Urban Built Environments

Introduction

Human activity and built environment, in addition to the geographical location and local climate of cities, determine the characteristics of urban climate. It is a well-known fact that urban design parameters and practices influence urban microclimates. There are many studies in the literature focused on the effects of different urban design parameters on microclimate for specific urban spaces. Most of them are focused on individual design parameters such as street orientation, street width, aspect ratios, building and pavement materials, and vegetation. In general, those issues are separately taken into consideration in each study, but a different method based on comparative assessment is needed for climate-related studies due to the complexity of determinants on urban climate. Many different kinds of design parameters such as sealed surfaces, green areas, height of the buildings, street orientations, materials on building surfaces, and width of streets affect relevant meteorological indicators such as temperature, direction and speed of wind, evaporation, humidity, and sunshine duration. These parameters may have both negative and positive effects on the local climate.

Conclusion

Evaluation allows us to make great progress in the process of constructing an urban planning scenario, since it gives figures to complex phenomena and then guides the understanding of the proposal toward its supposed effects. The use of LCA allows us in this evaluation process to introduce objective criteria based on hypotheses and data, not only on perceptions and intuition as it is often used in urban planning. The difficulty, however, is to measure in a fair and balanced way, with timely and representative data that, although limitations must always be admitted, may provide a meaningful interpretation of the impacts generated. The revision of the climate change indicator is necessary in the current context where climate change is no longer a hypothesis but a prospective vision. Urban projects, established for the long term, must consider and integrate climate change indicators, not only based on mitigation. Therefore, it is proposed to continue this work in order to define the indicator and its application to an experimental process in peri-urban neighborhoods of Latin American cities in order to arrive at an efficient and pertinent tool.