URBAN MORPHOLOGY AS A MITIGATION STRATEGY OF URBAN WARMING IN "OASIS CITIES" OF ARID REGIONS

CORREA, ERICA N.; SOSA, M. BELÉN; CANTÓN, M. ALICIA; RUIZ, M. ANGÉLICA

Urban Microclimate Modelling for Comfort and Energy Studies

Springer International Publishing

Año: 2021; p. 419 - 441

Taking into consideration the features of Mendoza, it is useful to investigate the consequences of the implemented design decisions and its influences on outdoor thermal behavior in summer. In this context, this chapter revises the research findings conducted by INAHE-CONICET-CCT, Mendoza, whose goal was to define and quantify which variables?forest, morphological, and material?determine air temperature during daytime and nighttime as well as the degree of outdoor habitability to identify the best urban configurations.Stead and Marshall (2001) argue that literature?s focus has been on macro features, such as settlement size, mix of land uses, and density, while lower scale features, such as neighborhood design, may also be relevant but have been overlooked. Ko and Radke (2014) have demonstrated that urban forms have a statistically significant impact on energy saving for building cooling. They consider that an optimized community layout and vegetation planting will have a significant impact on macroscale environments in the long term. In the MMA the incorporation of street trees and optimized albedo values reaches an average air temperature reduction of 3.4 °C. For this reason, the incorporation of suitable envelope materials and street trees into the neighborhood design stage is imperious.The optimization of a single building orientation is estimated to have minimal reductions on annual energy use and costs (Silva et al. 2017). However, for a whole community or urban area, important savings may be achieved by improving building orientation (Hemsath 2016). In this respect, this study suggests two layout orientations (NO-SE and N-S) that demonstrate to be more energy efficient in summertime for the Southern Hemisphere.Urban form and land-use patterns significantly influence a city?s thermal behavior and energy consumption. Regarding the thermal behavior, results show that with an adequate layout orientation, tree selection, and an improvement in the material albedo, a traditional social house built without any bioclimatic design strategy would consume at least 21% less auxiliary energy to achieve an indoor comfort temperature (25 °C) during summertime. Moreover, the study detected that with every 1 °C average air temperature increases the auxiliary energy consumption will increase 26 kWh (0.3 kWh/m2). Likewise, within the three urban grids tested in the ?optimized scenarios? there are energy consumption differences between 1% and 8% when comparing orientations and street widths (i.e., the 16 m street width orientated NO-SE in the rectangular grids consumes 8% less energy than the same scenario in the cul-de-sac grid). The observation above highlights the importance that design and planning decisions have to build social housing settlements in oasis cities with arid climates that are more responsible towards the environment and more efficient in terms of energy use.