CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The rise of sustainable development as a popular concept has resumed the discussion about the form of cities. Certainly, it has motivated planners and experts in different disciplines to seek forms of human settlements that meet sustainability requirements and enable built environments to function in a more constructive way than they do at present. In this sense, the understanding and assessment of the thermal behavior of urban areas is a basic need to go over strategies that help developing a bioclimatic urban design, that is, adapted to the climatic characteristics of the city site location. This assessment includes, of course, the contribution of the urban green structures. In this study, the reference case is Mendoza`s Metropolitan Area (MMA), Argentina; located in a seismic and semiarid region. The urban model presents wide road channels and different tree species along the streets in opposition to the compact city model. This paper evaluates the impact over outdoor thermal comfort produced by the combination of low building densities; different widths of circulation channels (30, 20 and 16 meters) and diverse forest species magnitudes in summer. Eighteen cases have been assessed using the COMFA (Comfort Formula) method. The final goal is to establish the interrelationships among these urban variables, so as to obtain their optimal combination for thermal comfort in outdoor spaces, and to minimize energy consumption and its subsequent pollution emissions. Key words: thermal comfort, forest species, rational use of energy, sustainable cities, arid regions.