Urban Microclimate and Air Quality as Drivers of Urban Design

Dear Colleagues,

Anthropogenic activities are dramatically impacting the quality of our environment in multiple and varied ways—and this is especially the case in cities where more than 50% of the global population now lives.

Factors such as the sealing of soil, the contamination of water and air, and the emission of atmospheric greenhouse gases are combining to make the urban environment less livable. Efforts to better understand these problems have been intensifying within the scientific community, with a broad array of research studies focusing on various topics related to environmental quality and human health, including the urban heat island, outdoor thermal comfort, and urban air quality. These phenomena have been analyzed at varying degrees of resolution, from the microscale to the city level, and using different approaches such as field monitoring, remote sensing, and simulation models.

The knowledge generated by such analyses can provide useful support for formulating and implementing urban planning and design strategies that properly address these issues. Unfortunately, however, these diverse aspects of urbanization are rarely integrated in a systematic way in the actual development process. Both academicians and public administrators are responsible for this gap, as scientists fail to produce information that is comprehensible for policy makers, and practitioners are not encouraged to take these issues into account when facing difficult urban planning and design decisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the consequential changes that modern society is undergoing have called into question the extent of our collective environmental resilience—making it clearer than ever that scientific knowledge must be integrated in decision-making processes if we hope to sustain a viable urban lifestyle.

This Special Issue aims to collect works that improve on this knowledge, and enrich our common understanding of how urban design can positively or negatively affect the quality of the urban environment. The focus is on outdoor thermal comfort and air quality, with emphasis placed on studies showing how research can be integrated into the design process and how policies can enhance the environmental effectiveness of concrete urban interventions.

Dr. Luciano Massetti
Prof. Dr. David Pearlmutter
Guest Editors

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