This chapter focuses on the impact that urban development has had on mid-climate cities, with high consumption of natural resources, significant waste production and environmental impact, and encroachment on productive or wild territories. In these cities, buildings are dependent on considerable energy consumption to achieve internal comfort and habitability. Considering cities as urban ecosystems allows us to study them in a way that allows us to propose new strategies to improve the efficiency of urban systems, reducing their impact on the habitability of buildings and the city itself, as well as reducing their ecological footprint. In this chapter, the authors will discuss aspects of the urban climate that affect the well-being of citizens inside and outside buildings, such as natural lighting, sunlight, natural ventilation, and wind, and how planning can improve them.
Top1. Introduction
One of the processes with the greatest ecological impact of our society is the urban growth on the territory, especially as developed in the last 150 years. The process —accelerated in the fifties of the last century— generated an extraordinary expansion of urbanization throughout the planet, fundamentally linked to the growth of world population growth and the economic boom after the second world war (Domínguez-Amarillo et al., 2016).
The “diffuse city” growth model has mostly been followed (Bretagnolle et al., 2000). Suburbs, polygons, scattered over the territory, with commercial, industrial, and leisure centers organized around transport nodes (Li & Gong, 2016). This is a model with high consumption of resources, (soil, energy, water, etc.), with high waste production and an increasing environmental impact on its near- and far environment (Clark et al., 2018). Urban growth dynamics is an unstoppable process with high consumption of energy, primary resources, and productive and/or wild territory. This dynamic highlights the need to undertake one of the greatest challenges such as generating models of sustainable urban development.
The architectural types mostly in use in the twentieth century city - even today - follow the principles of design of the “International Style” with very similar city layouts for any place on the planet and usually based on prototypical solutions (Helleman & Wassenberg, 2004; Lang, 2009). They show more often a common indifference to climate, geographical, and cultural context as for local identity (Hebbert, 2014; Verlie, 2020). In most cases, buildings are highly dependent on mechanical solutions for environmental conditioning with a high associated energy consumption for thermal comfort, habitability, and operation. It is not until the last decades of this century, as consequences of successive energy crises, that concern for energy efficiency has started to become part of the building agenda. Based on a systemic analysis, some authors point to the growing inefficiency of the current urban model (MAHMOUD et al., 2021; Vijayan et al., 2021).
Most of the urban areas where the population develops its normal life not only have a significant impact on the biotope but, more often, even negative effects on its citizens (de Sa et al., 2022). The citizens work in environments with limitations to natural lighting and to access to a steady flow of clean air, suffer from noise and other related damages. In many cases, city inhabitants do not have individual capacity to adapt and control their nearby environment, depending on general schedules, thus increasing the problems of adaptation and perception of the quality of the environment. Usually, this situation worsens due to lack of visual contact with open outdoor spaces. Efficient and healthy urban development should encourage their buildings to have sufficient access to and use of natural light, adequate rates of fresh air, fostering a significant number of hours of natural ventilation operation, and to have outdoor environments free of air pollutants, such as smoke, particulate matter, and toxic gases (Audrey & Batista-Ferrer, 2015; Satterthwaite, 1993).
To maximize psychological comfort, they must have a visual connection with open spaces, preferably landscaped or natural exteriors (Jabbar et al., 2022; Prospero & Health, 2010). After the recent health crisis of COVID-19, and its confinement and limitation of citizens' movements episodes -mandatory lockdowns, stay-at-home orders and the like, the population has become aware of the importance of buildings with open envelopes and the benefits provided by structures that facilitate the entry of air and natural light. After this social shock, many reflection processes on the quality of current built environments have been started (Lehberger et al., 2021; Poortinga et al., 2021).