Passive Cooling of Urban Areas

PASSIVE RESILIENCE

Recorded by Sofie Pelsmakers, images by Essi Nisonen and Veera Saastamoinen

KEY READINGS 

• Erell, E., Pearlmutter, D., Williamson, T., Urban Microclimate: Designing the Spaces Between Buildings, Routledge

• Huw Heywood, 101 Rules of Thumb for Sustainable Buildings and Cities, RIBA

• Cooling buildings sustainably in Europe: https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/cooling-buildings-sustainably-in-europe

• Szkordilisz, Flóra.Mitigation of urban heat island by green spaces. Pollack Periodica. 9. 91-100. 10.1556/Pollack.9.2014.1.10

• Gething, B., Puckett, K., Design for Climate Change, RIBA

• Pelsmakers, S., Donovan, E., Hoggard, A., Kozminska, U., Designing for the climate emergency, a Guide for Architecture Students, RIBA (2022).

• Yearly and seasonal wind direction checker, for example: www.windfinder.com

• Solar angle (altitude and azimuth) calculation tool, for example: www.suncalc.org

INSPIRATIONAL BUILT EXAMPLES

• The Vauban, Freiburg, Germany

• Turenscape, Mangrove Park sponge city, China

• Aecom, the Small Wild Goose Pagoda, Xi’an, China

• ASPECT Studios, Hyperlane Linear Sky Park, Chengdu, China

• Garibaldi Street, a giant urban cooling system and living laboratory, Lyon, France

• Cool Streets, Cool Communities: Strategies for building resilience and connectivity https://humanbydesign-perkinseastman.medium.com/cool-streets-cool-communities-2e8e79b14c65

• West 8 – Madrid RIO linear park, Madrid, Spain

PASSIVE COOLING OF URBAN AREAS

A ‘cool’ urban environment reduces the need for energy use to provide active cooling and ensures that buildings and spaces are at less risk of overheating. Key passive cooling strategies that you should include in your project at the urban scale are ensuring all sources of potential overheating are first minimised; the creation of extensive green, blue and social infrastructures at different scales, and working with knowledge about the prevailing wind to create urban environments that are comfortable year-round. In your project you should investigate the context and climate early on. and you need to radically 're-wild' our urban environment; this has many other co-benefits aside from summer cooling.