IMPACTOS DA MORFOLOGIA DA CIDADE NAS CONDIÇÕES MICROCLIMÁTICAS DE ÁREAS URBANAS CONSOLIDADAS DE SÃO PAULO EM DIAS QUENTES

Abstract

Different models of urban planning show how cities adapt to their growth, through horizontal expansion, densification and/or verticalization, composing the morphology of the city. Studies show that urban morphology can influence heat gain and reflection by the built masses in the urban space during the day and heat loss during the night, in addition to changing the speeds and directions of the winds that permeate the voids between buildings. Thus, the conception of urban morphology can contribute to increase or decrease the effects of urban heating phenomena, contributing to impact the conditions of pedestrians’ thermal comfort and of buildings air conditioning. This research evaluated the impacts of five different morphological compositions of urban areas on the local microclimate conditions perceived on the pedestrian scale during hot days, based on simulations of the thermal conditions of open urban spaces in areas of São Paulo neighborhoods, through ENVI-met software, calibrated from empirical measurements of microclimate variables in an existing city environment. The results of the five different models’ evaluations made it possible to verify that the morphological conditions are capable of contributing to the alteration of the main thermal variables of the open urban space and of pedestrians’ thermal comfort index. In the studied models, it was found that the higher the density and the verticalization, the milder the thermal conditions of the open urban spaces during the daytime, due to the shading caused by the buildings, and the higher the air temperature values at nighttime, due to the higher emission of long wave radiation by the urban canyon during the night.