Assessing Urban Ventilation in Common Street Morphologies for Climate-Responsive Design toward Effective Outdoor Space Regeneration

Abstract

Urban heat islands are an environmental hazard which degrade people’s lives worldwide, reducing social life and increasing health problems, forcing scientists to design innovative acclimatization methods in public places, such as sheltering. This paper focuses on providing quantitative indicators about airflow rates and qualitative information about airflow patterns in street canyons for typical street canyon morphologies, which is essential when designing outdoor acclimatization strategies to mitigate urban overheating. This is based on CFD simulations using an enhanced numerical domain model, which can reduce computational cost and simulation time. The study is performed for different ARs, from wide (AR = 0.75) to narrow (AR = 4), and wind speed to characterize their effect on street ventilation The results show that air renewal decreases while the AR increases. The reduction is faster for a low AR and then comes to a standstill for a high AR. In addition, the study shows that inside narrow streets, the pattern of airflow is affected by the wind velocity magnitude. These findings provide numerical values of air ventilation for a wide range of typical street canyon configurations, which represent essential data for designing effective climate control strategies, mitigating urban heat islands and conducting outdoor thermal comfort studies. This work contributes valuable knowledge to the multidisciplinary efforts aimed at enhancing urban living environments.