EFFECT OF URBAN FOREST ON DAYLIGHT AVAILABILITY IN BUILT ENVIRONMENTS. THE CASE OF METROPOLITAN AREA IN MENDOZA.

CLAUDIA F. MARTINEZ; LORENA CÓRICA,; MARTÍN ENDRIZZI; ANDREA PATTINI; ALICIA CANTÓN

Switzerland

Conferencia; Conference on Passive and Low Energy Architercure (PLEA 2006); 2006

In the city of Mendoza, Argentina, the urban greening is a predominant feature of the city structure. Even when trees lined along streets generate a number of benefits on the sustainability of the urban environment, the case of deciduous species included, at the building scale it conditions the access to climatic resources in a measure that is necessary to quantify. The paper presents the first results of the development of horizontal (Eh) and vertical (Ev) illuminance measurements in summer, in urban canyons of low density built environments, similar morphological variables and forested with the most representative tree species in the city?s capital district:: London Plane (Platanus acerifolia), Mulberry (Morus sp.) and European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior).  The results obtained allow to identify behaviour and illuminance ranges associated to the urban tree pattern, its development and its spatial configuration: the discontinuous structures of Ash allowed the greatest access to the resource ((Eh: 94,0000 lux on causeway; 18,000 to 50,000 lux on sidewalks) when related to vaulted structures of a continuous type: London Plane and Mulberry (Eh: 15,000 to 73,000 lux on causeway; 4,000-10,000 lux on the sidewalk), conditioning the open sky resource in a lesser degree on causeways than on sidewalks. In future stages, the results obtained will be correlated with those yielded by the use of computational models to the effect of identifying the incidence of the sky diffuse and reflected components, from the visible sky vault and the nearby environment respectively, and with those obtained in nocturnal measurements.