Ricerc@Sapienza

In order to face increasing socio-economic challenges in a climate-change scenario, we should aim at redesigning our built environment, improving resilience and sustainability. Green infrastructure – trees in particular – play a critical role in urban heat island mitigation. Outdoor comfort simulations are useful tools to assess microclimate, and the different parameters influencing human energy balance and thermal comfort.

This contribution regards the technological innovation and the transformation of outdoor spaces within the consolidated city where the theme of the research focuses on environmental recovery practices and adaptation to climate change in the open urban public space in the Mediterranean area. In particular, certain innovative technologies are investigated, verifying their effectiveness and impact on environmental sustainability within the urban tissue, with the ultimate aim of ensuring the user’s thermo-hygrometric comfort.

Global and local climate change increases the occurrence and the magnitude of extreme phenomena, as urban heat island and heat waves. These phenomena seriously affect the quality of life in several aspects: society, health, environment; they also heavily affect the building sector, increasing the energy use for cooling and deteriorating the indoor thermal environment. This paper utilizes data from a continuous urban microclimatic monitoring over three years to quantify the impact of heat waves on the thermal quality of two reference residential buildings in the city of Rome, Italy.

Employees’ wellbeing and comfort perception demonstrated to largely influence their productivity and tolerability of slight thermal discomfort conditions in the working spaces. Their whole comfort perception indeed depends on several parameters related to physical boundary conditions but also to the adaptation capability of occupants themselves and other personal, difficult to measure, variables. According to the available standards and regulations, only physical and measurable environmental parameters must be considered to evaluate occupants’ comfort conditions.