The role of planning, urban and building design for climate adaptation in the microscale. Contributions to an interdisciplinary approach
This proposal deals with the role of planning, urban design and building design for climate change adaptation in microscale. The aim is to quantify the impacts on urban microclimate, based on present and future climate scenarios, regarding: 1) the urban density; 2) the building envelope and other urban surfaces; 3) vegetation and its urban insertion in different forms; 4) as well as thermal performance and thermal comfort of buildings, during occasional heat waves events or even for the projected scenarios of climate change, under current emissions. The proposed method includes, for urban and buildings’ scales: 1) data raising and/or production of maps to identify study areas; 2) development of fieldwork plans according to the resources and constraints of the models to be adopted; 3) primary data collection in urban scale for soil, vegetation and atmosphere at ground level and in the top of the model, to be obtained by microclimatic measurements coupled with remote sensing data (RS) and geographic information systems (SIGs), and by measurements of environmental variables on building scale; 4) modelling of the study areas; 5) validation and calibration of the models between measured and simulated data; 5) development of parametric studies and selection of the best strategies from simulation results for current and future climate scenarios. Expected results include the impact’s quantification of density, vegetation and urban surfaces in microclimate, as well as the effects of adaptation strategies to climate change for urban areas and buildings, in current and future climates.