Overheating of cities is causing serious energy, environmental and health problems and it has a serious impact on the whole economic and cultural life of cities. To counterbalance the impact of high urban temperatures several mitigation technologies have been proposed, developed and implemented. Monitoring of several large-scale urban projects involving the application of mitigation technologies has demonstrated the possibility decreasing the peak ambient temperature of the precincts up to 2.5 °C.
Analysis reveals that the magnitude of the overheating depends on many parameters of which the more important are: The layout and the characteristics of the buildings and open spaces, the type of the materials used, the released anthropogenic heat, the land use, the climatic conditions, etc. Several studies have been performed to understand and evaluate the impact of some of the above parameters; however, detailed studies to investigate the impact of the precincts’ layout and characteristics on the urban overheating are not widely available.
sydneys third city sp0012u1 final report (32960224 PDF)