Urban Wind Environment ― Integrated Climate Sensitive Planning and Design

In the context of urbanization and compact urban living, conventional experience-based planning and design often cannot adequately address the serious environmental issues, such as thermal comfort and air quality. The ultimate goal of this book is to facilitate a paradigm shift from the conventional experience-based ways to a more scientific, evidence-based process of decision making in both urban planning and architectural design stage. This book introduces novel yet practical modelling and mapping methods, and provides scientific understandings of the urban typologies and wind environment from the urban to building scale through real examples and case studies. The tools provided in this book aid a systematic implementation of environmental information from urban planning to building design by making wind information more accessible to both urban planners and architects, and significantly increasing the impact of urban climate information on the practical urban planning and design. This book is a useful reference book to architectural postgraduates, design practitioners and planners, urban climate researchers, as well as policy makers for developing future livable and sustainable cities.

Dr. Yuan Chao is an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture of National University of Singapore (NUS). Dr. Yuan’s research interests are the climate sensitive urban planning and design for livable and sustainable cities, focusing on urban aerodynamic properties that is difficult but critical part of high-density urban climate. Dr. Yuan has participated in several key policy-level research projects commissioned by Hong Kong Government, as well as actively involved in a few Chinese (e.g., Wuhan and Macau) projects. He developed the Frontal Area Density understanding, which provides an important knowledge linking the built morphology and the city’s aerodynamic potentials. This work is now incorporated into Hong Kong and Wu Han’s urban climatic research for city planners’ references.