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In the context of dense urban environments and climate change, pedestrians’ thermal experience plays an increasingly significant role in people’s health and well-being. In this research, the authors combine the fields of architecture, climate-responsive design, and robotic fabrication with the goal of investigating strategies to improve outdoor thermal comfort for pedestrians in cities with frequent extreme heat events. Based on a case study in the city of Munich, this paper presents findings into the technological approaches and methods for location-specific climate-resilient brick facades using robotic assembly. To achieve this goal, different bricklaying patterns were investigated to create a self-shading effect and thus reduce solar radiation and ultimately achieve an improved thermal condition for pedestrians moving along urban facades at street level. Using computer-aided microclimate simulation, generic self-shading brick pattern designs were tailored to highly location-specific microclimate requirements. Robotic assembly technology was used to produce such tailored, non-standard brickwork facades. The results of this research led to a data-informed design process with a demonstrator object being realized at 1:1 scale with a height of 2 m and a length of 3 m using a collaborative robot on site. Thermal measurements on the built demonstrator provided indications of reduced surface temperatures despite high solar radiation and thus validated the location-specific self-shading effects according to solar radiation simulation.

Brick is one of the most widely used building materials worldwide, and this is projected to continue. The clay material, due to its high thermal capacity, robustness and formal flexibility, can be assembled in different ways to control thermal behavior with self-shading or adding active interventions like extra moisture. Additionally, bricks as modular elements have the potential to be further studied in terms of geometric configurations to minimize or maximize their solar exposure for summer or winter scenarios, as climate control elements. The potential of sprinkled bricks decreasing surface temperature of building envelopes could significantly contribute to an improved microclimate and improved urban heat island. This chapter investigates the potentials of different geometric brick patterns and their behavior on self-shading potential to reduce mean surface temperature of solar-exposed brick walls. The study is shaped into two layers: field measurements for geometric behavior and evaporative cooling potential. The results are discussed and compared for three configurations of solid, extruded, and perforated under varying boundary conditions over a day. Field measurements of solar-exposed brick mock-ups were conducted in a range of experiments and their surface temperatures monitored. The results show an average temperature difference of 8°C between a straight solid wall and an optimized brick pattern featuring self-shading geometry. A second experiment showed 11°C of surface temperature difference combining self-shading brick geometry with irrigated surfaces.

Studies on microclimate of cities have already proved that pedestrian thermal comfort is function of built environment and it is fundamental to understand this phenomena both with numerical techniques and field measurements to achieve comfortable, healthier and more livable urban spaces. There has been wide variety of methods to approach this question that how people react or behave in transient outdoor condition since most of the thermal comfort studies perceive pedestrian thermal comfort as “static” phenomena. The application of thermal comfort monitoring in transient conditions is limited due to complexity of the task and instrumental setup which leads to lack of understanding about how pedestrians compensate heat loads. This study contributes in two directions, first to setup a georeferenced environmental monitoring equipment as a methodology and second to use the toolkit to have better understanding of dynamic thermal comfort and the thresholds for tolerance to thermal discomfort.

The Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) has been linked to outdoor activity patterns and used to evaluate the effectiveness of urban interventions to improve thermal comfort. This study investigates how simulating the urban environment at increasing levels of physical accuracy impacts UTCI values along three cycling routes in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Baseline UTCI values are estimated using a local weather file, and the following increments in physical accuracy are considered: wind-scaling, shading from buildings, shading and cooling from trees, computational fluid dynamics simulations for wind speeds, and simulated surface temperatures. With bike ridership data from Bluebikes, Boston's bike-sharing program, the relationship between bike ridership patterns and UTCI values along each route is studied. Supervised machine learning models are applied to predict bike ridership based on UTCI and other predictors. UTCI simulation results show that incorporating the various increments of accuracy influences hourly UTCI values at urban areas and exposed areas differently. Incorporating local wind speeds is especially impactful for urban areas. The statistical models trained to predict hourly bike trip counts based on UTCI and other demand and weather predictors achieved a root-mean-squared error of 1.06 trips. 47% of predictions were correct, and an additional 42% of predictions were off by 1 trip. This study demonstrates the importance of spatial refinement in simulating UTCI, and motivates future research into efficient simulation methods or rules-of-thumb for deriving spatial-temporal UTCI values. Future work into building a robust predictive model would motivate the design of thermally comfortable environments for human-powered transportation in cities.

In urban areas the impact of built environment on wellbeing and human health should be considered due to urban heat island phenomenon. The present research aims at identifying a method for an accurate estimation of thermal outdoor comfort and mean radiant temperature, modeling and simulating the effects of urban form and vegetation on microclimate of cities. In order to reach this main objective, this research incorporates CFD based simulation tool ENVI-met and TRNSYS (Transient Systems Simulation) by means of Grasshopper. The results of the study demonstrate the reliability of the proposed method, i.e. that a combination of ENVI-met and TRNSYS increases the simulation accuracy in terms of outdoor thermal comfort, especially during night. This method allows exploiting the potentialities of both ENVI-met and TRNSYS for the calculation of urban features (urban form, vegetation, canyon proportion, etc.) affecting urban microclimate.

The term appropriation in general definition, is known as a temporary phenomenon that implies a dynamic process (human activities) of interaction between the individual and its surroundings (built environment). The term in generally used to illuminate the connection between people and public spaces in social science; however, the footprint of environmental studies is underestimated. This is not because our thermal sense of a place is inconsequential or superfluous, but simply because our scientific understanding of human thermal perception in the outdoor context is not yet at the stage where it can be purposively engineered and managed. This chapter intends to focus on the Temporary Appropriation (TA) happening in public spaces to give the citizens the right to fully use and manage their everyday life within the urban environment. This approach highlights the necessity of adapting human comfort to the needs of a city to compensate sudden and unexpected changes due to urban microclimate. In the context of the enormous urbanization phenomena occurring all over the world, the relevance of this issue increasingly gains importance. There is still an open question, if the daily public life or use of urban spaces can be acknowledged as appropriation or not. If yes, is this temporary or permanent? The concept of appropriation is closely tied to the sense of identity and comfort as well, besides temporal factors. This chapter will conclude supporting the idea that the temporary appropriation takes place in urban public spaces in which individuals or group of people feels culturally and environmentally identified.

About half of the energy loss in buildings is wasted through windows. Determining the optimum window-to-wall ratio (WWR) for different building facades would reduce such energy losses. The optimum WWR is the window area that minimizes the total annual energy of cooling, heating, and lighting. The purpose of this study is to investigate the optimum WWR of different facades of an office building. For this purpose, a sample building is simulated by means of DesignBuilder software in order to investigate the annual solar heat gain, cooling load, heating load, and lighting consumption for the three cities of Bushehr, Shiraz, and Tabriz, and optimum window areas of office buildings for the three cities are determined. Based on the results, the optimum window area for the north building facade for all climates is 20&ndash, 30%. This amount for the southern facade of the building in Bushehr, Shiraz, and Tabriz is, respectively, 20&ndash, 30%, 10&ndash, 30%, and 20&ndash, 50%. The optimum window area for the eastern and western building facades in Bushehr is 30&ndash, 50%, in Tabriz it is 40&ndash, 70%, and in Shiraz it is 20&ndash, 60% and 40&ndash, 70%, respectively. The difference between the maximum and minimum energy consumption with different window areas in Bushehr and Shiraz is 20&ndash, 100% and in Tabriz it is 16&ndash, 25%.

Extensive cost in the building industry comes from cooling and heating to create thermal comfort. Hence, it is necessary to utilize passive solutions, in addition to suitable design, in order to reduce energy consumption. This research attempts to investigate the impact of archetype patterns in office buildings on annual energy consumption for cooling, heating and daylight loads. For this purpose, the DesignBuilder software was used to compare the forms. In this study, four conventional construction forms were considered, including the single and dense form, central courtyard buildings, U form and linear form, and each was considered with two, four and six-stories. Forms were simulated in the three cities of Bushehr, Shiraz and Tabriz, with hot-humid, hot-dry and cold climates, respectively. The results revealed that the office building with a linear form in Bushehr had the lowest energy consumption in the two and four-story forms, and also in the six-story form, the central courtyard form had the lowest energy consumption. Additionally, the central courtyard forms in Tabriz and Shiraz had the lowest energy consumption in all cases. Finally, the linear form possessed the most natural daylight through all of the studied cases for the three cities in terms of natural light gain.

Majority of the world population live in urban settlements where for the city dwellers, the quality of life is directly influenced by the environmental conditions as a result of the built environment. The environmental conditions on the public realm and in the buildings, shape how people use outdoor and indoor spaces in their daily life. Correspondingly, the present study implements a generative approach to link urban physical density to performative urban design to investigate the environmental impacts of urban morphology. This approach could be beneficial to implement performance-based planning (PBP), as a method for climate change adaptation and environmental resilience, to improve citizens’ wellbeing. Selected performance measures for this study are: nocturnal Urban Heat Island effect, outdoor solar access (for winter and summer) and indoor daylight availability. The results are analyzed based on the mathematical correlations between building form factors and environmental qualities, within varying range of generated building densities. The study shows that, in the case of buildings with square foot print, maximum potential UHI is highly dependent on height of the urban canyon and optimum outdoor solar access during summer is achievable with intermediate canyon width. Daylight variations mainly depend on window to wall ratio (WWR). In addition, with high WWR values (0.7), canyon height and building geometry sequentially have the highest influence on indoor daylight availability.

This chapter describes the positive effects and improvements of green streets on outdoor thermal comfort, considering the relevant influence on human well-being and urban heat island phenomenon in cities. The most influencing characteristics of plant species, which determine outdoor comfort, are described, e.g., foliage shape and dimension, leaf area density, and seasonal cycle. In order to investigate effective factors determining thermal comfort, an analysis of parameters, i.e., wind speed, air temperature, relative humidity, and mean radiant temperature, is provided. Simulation results of summer performances of greenery in urban canyons show different performances depending on the relation between trees and the built environment during day and night.

The concept of resilience in urban design and decision-making is principally focused on change instead of resistance over an adaptive process. For cities, this concept in a broader scale means how to withstand unforeseen events that will fundamentally amend the city’s wellbeing, rather than being stabilized and protected. The same concept is applicable for outdoor comfort as an adaptive approach to compensate extreme heat waves and health risk conditions. This chapter presents methods, tools, and applications to enhance urban resilience at a micro scale looking for correlations between environmental factors and human behavior in terms of outdoor comfort.

In critical assessments of social change, terms like mediatization, globalization, commercialization and individualization are the pioneer ones; according to Friedrich Krotz, these terms are parallel "meta-processes" which influence of society, culture and related interactions with long term effects. This parallelogram could possibly generate a “mediated globalizational approach”, by means of local/global interactive reconsideration. Moreover, communication and information technology is a key factor in the so called consideration. “Mediatization” generates an environment of high degree of self-selective determination by the aid of social and cultural aspects of globalization. During the mentioned “ization-process”, the new term of “Mcdonaldization” represents another contemporary juxtaposition within globalization improvement; the metaphor of Mcdonaldization basically refers to the creation of a compact idea of education. The combination of 5 “ization”s and their structural relation opens up a new attitude toward the profession of architecture. This article will discuss the consequence of mentioned term (Globalization, Mediatization, Commercialization, Individualization And Mcdonaldization) in the lens of professionalism in architecture generates a valuable platform by means of systematic process and reflects itself on architecture education and practice. Mediated interpersonal communication, beside the interactive communicational facilities provided by internet such as weblogs (blogs) in the societies with barriers of communication has been developing new opportunities for self-determination and self-expression. As a case, this socio-organic movement could be evaluated as strategic approach to Globalization/Mediatization from a local/regional innovative job-oriented group with globalized attitudes. The main aim of this research is to enhance, evaluate and boost this movement based on its communicational advantages and by surveying the “Archi-Blog” (the terms is used to describe a blog which is about architecture profession and related issues) via the transformation toward "multicultural working environments" which is open to cultural innovative issues and proposes a systematic method of “Post-Professional” Education in “Architecture and Urban Studies”. Globalization, Mediatization, Commercialization, Individualization, Mcdonaldization, Archi-Blog, multicultural working environments.