Development of human comfort criteria for environmental conditions in urban areas
Abstract
At the start of the 20th century only about one person in ten lived in a city, but today the proportion of urban and rural dwellers is approximately equal (United Nation Report, 2005). Even in a rough estimate of this development the importance of urban space to any society is undeniable. In this respect the search for the ideal city becomes the primary quest for city planners, architects and engineers. The development of design towards an ideal city is a part of a research activity on Urban Environments at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Department of Civil Engineering. The chosen approach shall address issues that derive from the functional demands in a modern city, its geometry and architectural appearance and from the effect of urban climate on city life. Before entering a phase of model simulation the relation between the aforementioned aspects and their relevance to city life will be studied, based on full-scale registration of urban environment parameters. The collected data and observations will be used to review existing criteria allowing assessing urban space quality for city life. The overall aim of our research is to create a holistic method to determines and describe the value of urban space for city life. The method shall provide both sufficient basic information to be used by city planners and architects in the early conceptual stage of a development project and a holistic simulation tool for a detailed analysis of development projects with respect to urban space quality. The work presented in this paper is the first step in identifying and understanding the different factors affecting the human perception of urban space quality. For this purpose the registration of urban space conditions has been conducted on different locations in the city of Copenhagen. Furthermore, selected tests on human perception of climatic conditions have been performed in the newly developed Climatic Wind Tunnel facility (CWT), jointly operated by DTU and FORCE Technology in Lyngby, Denmark. The conducted work is related to a Ph.D. project on the integration of numerical simulation methods in the evaluation of urban space quality.
Info
Conference Paper, 2011
UN SDG Classification
DK Main Research Area
Science/Technology
