Isolating the impacts of urban form and fabric from geography on urban
heat and human thermal comfort
Kerry Nice
Transport, Health, and Urban Design Research Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia, Transport, Health, and Urban Design Research Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Corresponding Author:[email protected]
Author ProfileSachith Seneviratne
Transport, Health, and Urban Design Research Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia, Transport, Health, and Urban Design Research Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Author ProfileJason Thompson
{Transport, Health, and Urban Design Research Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia, {Transport, Health, and Urban Design Research Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Author ProfileAbstract
Public health risks resulting from urban heat in cities are increasing
due to rapid urbanisation and climate change, motivating closer
attention to urban heat mitigation and adaptation strategies that enable
climate-sensitive urban design and development. These strategies
incorporate four key factors influencing heat stress in cities: the
urban form (morphology of vegetated and built surfaces), urban fabric,
urban function (including human activities), and background climate and
regional geographic settings (e.g. topography and distance to water
bodies). The first two factors can be modified and redesigned as urban
heat mitigation strategies (e.g. changing the albedo of surfaces,
replacing hard surfaces with pervious vegetated surfaces, or increasing
canopy cover). Regional geographical settings of cities, on the other
hand, cannot be modified and while human activities can be modified, it
often requires holistic behavioural and policy modifications and the
impacts of these can be difficult to quantify. When evaluating the
effectiveness of urban heat mitigation strategies in observational or
traditional modelling studies, it can be difficult to separate the
impacts of modifications to the built and natural forms from the
interactions of the geographic influences, limiting the universality of
results. To address this, we introduce a new methodology to determine
the influence of urban form and fabric on thermal comfort, by utilising
a comprehensive combination of possible urban forms, an urban morphology
data source, and micro-climate modelling. We perform 9814 simulations
covering a wide range of realistic built and natural forms (building,
roads, grass, and tree densities as well as building and tree heights)
to determine their importance and influence on thermal environments in
urban canyons without geographical influences. We show that higher
daytime air temperatures and thermal comfort indices are strongly driven
by increased street fractions, with maximum air temperatures increases
of up to 10 and 15◦C as street fractions increase from 10% (very narrow
street canyons and/or extensive vegetation cover) to 80 and 90% (wide
street canyons). Up to 5◦C reductions in daytime air temperatures are
seen with increasing grass and tree fractions from zero (fully urban) to
complete (fully natural) coverage. Similar patterns are seen with the
Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), with increasing street fractions
of 80% and 90% driving increases of 6 and 12◦C, respectively. We then
apply the results at a city-wide scale, generating heat maps of several
Australian cities showing the impacts of present day urban form and
fabric. The resulting method allows mitigation strategies to be tested
on modifiable urban form factors isolated from geography, topography,
and local weather conditions, factors that cannot easily be modified.