Search Results (934)

Traditional air conditioning consumes substantial electricity, exacerbates the urban heat island effect, and creates a maladaptive feedback loop, necessitating a shift toward passive-first net-zero pathways. This study takes a typical six-story residential building in Nanjing’s hot summer and cold winter climate zone as a case study. Using EnergyPlus hourly simulations, three progressive passive strategy packages are designed to quantify the impact of building envelope heat exchange on cooling loads, grid stress, and heat resilience. Package A includes external shading and natural ventilation. Package B adds reflective coating and a green roof. Package C further adds night ventilation precooling and high-performance windows. The results show that Package C achieves a 62.5% reduction in peak cooling load and a 63.0% reduction in seasonal cooling load. Daytime peak inward heat gain decreases from 68 W/m² to 22 W/m², while nighttime outward heat dissipation increases from 12 W/m² to 38 W/m². Under an extreme heat day of 41.2 °C with no active cooling, indoor peak temperature drops from 36.8 °C to 29.4 °C, and heat risk hours decrease by 73.6%. Peak-hour power demand is reduced by 70.4%, with a systemic leverage factor of 1.08. Innovations include achieving over 60% load reduction using only mature passive strategies, introducing the systemic leverage factor to quantify urban heat island mitigation benefits, and establishing a vulnerability-to-resilience transformation framework. The passive-first pathway validates building envelope as the first line of defense for net-zero futures. However, the findings are based on a typical six-story residential building in Nanjing and require validation through field measurements or broader application across different climate zones and building typologies before generalization. Full article

Cities face the need to implement urban planning solutions that support sustainable development; however, this is not fully possible due to inadequate legal regulations. This development can be understood as increasing the environmental and economic resilience of urban areas and improving the quality of life for city residents. A noticeable trend in urban development plans is the implementation of the “15 min city”, “20 min city”, or similar concepts, which aim to enhance walkability by ensuring access to basic urban services and functions within walking distance. The aim of this article is to evaluate accessibility to green areas and selected educational services in cities (named in the article as MSAS–Municipal Standards for Accessibility of Social Infrastructure), and then to compare the results with proposed legal regulations in Poland that set minimum distances between social infrastructure zones and residential areas. The study will be conducted using selected urban centers: in Poland as a case study and in Belgium as verification. The use of spatial analysis methods (GIS) and a method transferability test enables the assessment of accessibility zones, as well as the identification of potential discrepancies between legal standards and actual accessibility conditions. In this context, this article addresses the question of whether accessibility standards for elementary schools and public green spaces can affect the future directions of residential development and urban spatial policy. The conclusions indicate that, although MSAS are not perfect solutions for a variety of reasons, they represent a step toward sustainable development. Full article

This study addresses the technical, environmental, economic, and systemic role of multi-apartment residential buildings as hydrogen consumption nodes within urban energy systems. A representative five-story building comprising 30 apartments and 2400–2800 m² of heated floor area, located in a cold European climate, was modelled with an annual heat demand of approximately 185,000 kWh. Four heating configurations were assessed: a conventional natural gas/biomethane boiler (baseline), a hydrogen boiler, a hydrogen-fuel-cell combined heat and power (CHP) system, and a hybrid heat-pump–hydrogen solution. Dynamic simulations indicate that all hydrogen-based systems can fully satisfy space heating and domestic hot water demand without modifications to the internal hydronic distribution network. The fuel cell CHP achieved an overall efficiency of 93%. It generated approximately 54,000 kWh/year of on-site electricity, while the hybrid configuration reached a seasonal efficiency of 108% and the highest primary energy reduction (46%). Operational CO₂ emissions decreased from 37,800 kg/year (gas baseline) to 1900 kg/year (green hydrogen boiler), 1200 kg/year (fuel cell CHP), and 900 kg/year (hybrid system), corresponding to reductions of up to 98%. Peak-load analysis demonstrated improved operational stability in CHP and hybrid systems, characterised by reduced cycling frequency and enhanced thermal resilience through hydrogen storage integration. Capital expenditure (CAPEX) ranged from 41,000 EUR (gas baseline) to 101,000 EUR (fuel cell CHP), reflecting additional storage, safety, and control requirements. Over a 20-year lifecycle (5% discount rate), the hybrid system achieved the lowest levelized cost of heat (0.076 EUR/kWh), followed by fuel cell CHP (0.081 EUR/kWh), compared to 0.087 EUR/kWh for gas. Payback periods ranged between 9 and 13 years, depending on configuration and hydrogen pricing assumptions. Sensitivity analysis identified a break-even hydrogen price of approximately 0.085 EUR/kWh, while carbon pricing above 100 EUR/t CO₂ significantly improves economic competitiveness. District-scale aggregation modelling suggests that hydrogen-equipped multi-apartment buildings can reduce grid electricity imports by 30–40% through on-site generation and seasonal storage. The findings confirm that multi-apartment buildings offer structural and economic advantages for early hydrogen deployment compared to dispersed housing typologies. By combining high demand density, centralised infrastructure, and compatibility with sector-coupling strategies, such buildings can function as distributed energy hubs within decarbonized urban systems. Full article

Early-stage residential building design in dense urban environments involves complex interactions among zoning regulations, geometric configuration, environmental performance, and economic feasibility. Conventional CAD–spreadsheet workflows and parametric BIM-based approaches remain limited in systematically resolving these interdependent trade-offs and typically rely on heuristic iteration and post hoc regulatory verification. To address this limitation, this study proposes REGEN, a regulation-aware BIM-enabled multi-objective optimization framework for sustainable residential building design. The framework formalizes planning and building-control regulations as explicit algebraic constraints embedded within a parametric BIM environment and integrates them with the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) to generate regulation-compliant design alternatives with respect to the encoded planning and building-control regulations. REGEN simultaneously optimizes five competing objectives: maximizing project profit, green-area provision, and building efficiency while minimizing geometric shape factor and building footprint area. A real condominium feasibility case in Bangkok, Thailand, is used to benchmark the proposed framework against conventional practice and parametric BIM-based design under identical site and regulatory conditions. The results reveal a non-convex Pareto front that exposes complex trade-offs among environmental, geometric, and economic objectives. The selected closest-to-utopia solution achieves 65.50% building efficiency, 606 m² of green area, a shape factor of 0.399, and a building footprint area of 1078 m² while maintaining a competitive project profit of 104.55 million THB without maximizing FAR utilization. The findings suggest that regulation-aware generative optimization has the potential to serve as an explainable and decision-oriented approach for sustainable construction and early-stage residential development planning. Full article

Rapid population ageing in China urgently demands improved attention to elderly friendly community green space design. Despite national efforts toward community renovation and urban regeneration, existing projects often overlook the systematic optimisation of green spaces explicitly tailored to elderly residents, leading to environments that inadequately support their physical, psychological, and social needs. Given that home-based care remains the predominant preference for elderly populations in China, creating optimised community green spaces is essential to facilitate healthy ageing-in-place effectively. This study systematically investigates the discrepancies between elders’ observed usage patterns and their stated landscape design preferences in two residential communities in Suzhou, China. By integrating year-round observational data with subjective interviews, the research identifies critical mismatches between elderly individuals’ actual behaviours and expressed preferences, highlighting significant deficiencies in current landscape designs. Comparative analyses reveal that prioritising microclimate comfort, accessible pathways, and targeted seating arrangements significantly enhances elderly usage frequency and satisfaction. Ultimately, this study provides practical, policy-aligned recommendations for designing climate-adaptive, elderly centric community green spaces, effectively contributing to sustainable urban renewal and the Healthy China 2030 initiative. Full article

Zero-shot remote sensing is attractive for scene classification because new regions, sensors, and label taxonomies often appear before sufficient annotated data are available for supervised adaptation. We present OATS-RS, an inference-centric framework that keeps a remote sensing vision–language model (VLM) backbone frozen and improves zero-shot decisions through ontology-aware prompt construction, hierarchical and contrastive scoring, adaptive multi-view aggregation, unlabeled transductive refinement, ambiguity-aware local re-ranking, and selective prediction. The method targets the common remote sensing regime in which neighboring classes such as annual crop, permanent crop, forest, pasture, herbaceous vegetation, river, and sea or lake overlap strongly in red–green–blue (RGB) appearance, meaning that they require more than a single class-name prompt. On the supplied final EuroSAT RGB evaluation with a GeoRSCLIP Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP)-family Vision Transformer Base with 32 × 32-pixel patches (ViT-B-32) backbone, the complete pipeline obtains top-1 accuracy of 0.522, balanced accuracy of 0.522, macro-averaged F1 score (macro-F1) of 0.535, and top-3 accuracy of 0.887. The strongest classes are industrial area, residential area, river, highway, and pasture, whereas the weakest classes remain herbaceous vegetation and several fine-grained vegetation categories. Selective prediction increases accepted-example accuracy to 0.538 at 0.934 coverage, but the expected calibration error (ECE) remains high at 0.384. These results support a qualified conclusion: ontology-guided zero-shot inference can already recover useful semantic shortlists for structured remote-sensing scenes, but fine-grained natural-class disambiguation, calibrated confidence, multi-dataset transfer, component-level ablations, and measured runtime remain essential before dependable deployment claims can be made. Full article

Urban green spaces (UGSs) are considered crucial for enhancing older adults’ subjective well-being. However, limited studies have explored the synergistic effects of UGS quality and quantity on satisfaction across green spaces, residential environments, and life domains, making it challenging to uncover the multifaceted sustainable benefits of UGSs on older adults’ subjective well-being. This study drew on multi-source data and place attachment theory to depict neighborhood-accessible UGS quantity (provision, accessibility, and visibility) and quality (cognition, behavior, and affect). Through the geographical visualization of bivariate SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) interaction values extracted from the trained eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model, and the comparison of bivariate SHAP maps with univariate SHAP maps, the study revealed the nonlinear geographic associations between UGS quantity and quality and three types of satisfaction. The results showed that when UGS quantity and quality coexisted, variations in the impact of quantity on older adults’ satisfaction were associated with quality differences. The gain effect of quality on quantity was more significant in areas with limited green space within a 500 m buffer zone. UGSs made a direct contribution to green space satisfaction, while their indirect association with life satisfaction surpassed that of residential satisfaction due to their provision of emotional qualities. This study calls for neighborhood green planning aimed at improving older adults’ subjective well-being, which should shift focus from quantity to quality and balance the relationship between quantity and quality based on regional characteristics. Full article

Rapid economic development has led to a growing reliance on private car commuting, making the mitigation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) pollution along road environments critical for the health of nearby residents. Road greening serves as an ecological barrier between traffic emissions and adjacent residential areas, and its effectiveness in reducing local CO₂ pollution has been widely studied. However, the influence of different spatial morphologies of road greening on the distribution of CO₂ around buildings remains underexplored. In this study, we developed a numerical simulation model to investigate CO₂ dispersion on building surfaces under various road greening spatial configurations. Simulation results indicate that a “tree–shrub–grass” composite configuration significantly reduces CO₂ concentrations around buildings. These findings provide practical guidance for optimizing vegetation spatial layouts in high-density road networks and contribute to the global pursuit of carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals. Full article

This paper explores how children perceive and use outdoor spaces in their everyday urban environment, and which spatial characteristics encourage engagement, autonomy, and diverse play. This study was conducted using child-led sensory walks—an exploratory qualitative method in which children acted as active research guides—with ten children aged 6 to 11 in residential areas of Zagreb. Verbal comments, movement patterns, and play behaviours were recorded and analysed through thematic analysis. Following the walks, eleven public playgrounds were assessed from a landscape architecture perspective, integrating children’s observations with an expert evaluation of spatial organisation, shade provision, connectivity with surrounding green spaces, and potential for unstructured play. The results reveal a pronounced preference for natural and semi-natural spaces, where children exhibited longer stays, more diverse physical and symbolic play, and a greater sense of autonomy. These findings affirm the relevance of affordance theory and multisensory experience in understanding children’s spatial behaviour and demonstrate the potential of the sensory walk as a transferable research and design tool in landscape architecture practice. At a broader scale, they point to the untapped role that playgrounds—redesigned as genuine green infrastructure nodes—could play in advancing urban climate adaptation goals at the neighbourhood scale. Full article

Urban soil contamination by potentially toxic elements (PTEs) is a recognized health concern in densely populated urban environments. Through a systematic meta-analysis of 91 peer-reviewed studies (2000–2025) reporting 12,174 sampling sites in capital and core cities, we characterized regional patterns in the spatiotemporal dynamics and health risks of eight PTEs across two well-represented continental subsets (Asia, k = 18–36 per element; Europe, k = 11–23 per element) with comparative reference to the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Given the uneven geographic distribution of qualifying primary studies, continental comparisons should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating: Asia (k = 18–36 per element) and Europe (k = 11–23 per element) provide the statistically robust core of the synthesis, while results for the Americas (k = 3–7 for several elements), Africa (k = 4–15), and Oceania (k = 2) are presented as illustrative rather than statistically representative. Pooled concentrations followed Zn (138.59) > Pb (56.97) > Cr (54.26) > Cu (47.00) > Ni (31.94) > As (8.56) > Hg (3.13) > Cd (1.23) mg·kg⁻¹. Within the well-represented Asian and European subsets, Asian cities showed the most severe enrichment of As, Cd, Cr, and Hg (I_geo > 4 in hotspots such as Kathmandu I_geo (Cd) = 7.06 and Jinan I_geo (Hg) = 5.27), whereas European centres exhibited substantial legacy Pb accumulation (pooled mean 87.69 mg·kg⁻¹). A reproducible pollution gradient was identified across functional zones: industrial > transportation ≥ residential > commercial > agricultural > urban green areas. The deterministic non-carcinogenic Hazard Index (HI = 1.49) for children in Asia exceeded the safe threshold (HI > 1), driven primarily by As and Cr exposure via incidental soil-and-dust ingestion. Monte Carlo probabilistic assessment (N = 10,000) confirmed elevated cumulative non-carcinogenic risk at the median of the exposure distribution for children in the data-rich Asian (P50 = 1.55; P(HI > 1) = 81.9%) and European (P50 = 1.28; P(HI > 1) = 69.8%) subsets, with adults in both subsets remaining well below the safety threshold (P(HI > 1) = 0.0%). Temporal analysis revealed a decoupling between economic growth and PTE accumulation in long-established cities, together with an inverse Ni–population correlation indicative of strategic resource allocation. For Asian capital and core cities, where the evidence base is strongest (k = 18–36 per element), the present synthesis supports further investigation of risk-based, child-centric soil management as a public-health priority. For European cities (k = 11–23 per element), the same direction of risk is indicated but should be confirmed in regionally focused syntheses. Policy considerations for under-represented regions should await expansion of the primary monitoring base. Full article

This study investigates the association between urban greenness and sales in commercial alleys. We focus on 1090 commercial alleys in Seoul, South Korea, defined as neighborhood-scale open commercial streets or districts composed of small retail, service, cafe, and restaurant businesses, and combine spatially explicit measures of greenness with data on weekend sales to assess how variation in vegetation is associated with local economic performance. Greenness is measured by the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from remote sensing imagery. We employ a set of global and spatially explicit models, including Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR), and a Python Geographical Random Forest (PyGRF, v0.0.12), to capture both overall and location-specific relationships. The results show that higher levels of greenness are significantly associated with higher weekend sales, with spatial heterogeneity observed across different areas of the city. The green investment efficiency index (GIEI) results further identify clusters of high investment efficiency in areas characterized by strong greenness–sales associations and relatively limited existing greenness. High GIEI values were concentrated in areas near natural amenities and dense residential neighborhoods, indicating potential priority locations for targeted greening interventions. By linking objective measures of greenness to observed sales at the scale of everyday commercial environments, this study contributes to a better understanding of how urban greenness is associated with consumer behavior and local economic activity. The findings provide practical implications for identifying areas where greening strategies may be considered as part of broader efforts to support more resilient and sustainable neighborhood commercial areas, while recognizing that the observed relationships are associative rather than causal. Full article

The recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) accelerates the transition from nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEBs) to zero-emission buildings (ZEBs), requiring solar readiness and life-cycle Global Warming Potential (GWP) disclosure. Yet operational performance, future-climate adaptation and whole-life carbon (WLC) are still often assessed separately, limiting actionable evidence for residential ZEB design in northern climates. This study provides an integrated design-decision framework coupling annual IDA-ICE simulations under five weather scenarios, including Urban Heat Island (UHI)-adjusted present and 2080 RCP8.5 + UHI files, with an EN 15978/Level(s)-based WLC assessment in One Click LCA for twelve design cases of a Lithuanian dwelling. For the PV-equipped baseline, heating electricity decreases by 24% and cooling increases by 31% from present conditions to 2080 RCP8.5 + UHI. External shading and night purge provide the strongest annual cooling and operative-temperature-exceedance reductions. The ZEB baseline reduces WLC by 19.0% relative to A0; the biogenic-insulation green-roof case gives the lowest non-storage WLC (−25.2%); and battery-assisted cases provide the largest reductions under the static B6 electricity factor (up to −52.1%). The findings provide case-study evidence that EPBD-aligned residential ZEB design should evaluate passive cooling, PV/storage and material choices jointly, rather than sequentially, when developing future performance thresholds and design guidance. Full article

Understanding the complex relationship between the built environment and urban vitality is essential for evidence-based urban renewal. However, most existing studies rely on linear regression models that fail to capture the non-linear threshold effects inherent in urban systems and depend on costly proprietary datasets that limit reproducibility. This study proposes a scalable, open-data-driven framework to decode the non-linear mechanisms governing population-based urban vitality in Zhengzhou, a rapidly regenerating metropolis in Central China. Using Areas of Interest (AOIs) as functional spatial units to mitigate the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP), we construct a multidimensional built environment indicator system (5D+S: Density, Diversity, Design, Distance to Transit, Destination Accessibility, and Surroundings) from multi-source open data, including 100 m WorldPop population grids, OpenStreetMap building vectors, Points of Interest (POIs), and transit station data. An explainable machine learning approach combining XGBoost with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) is employed to identify the relative importance of built environment factors and quantify their non-linear threshold effects on population-based urban vitality (operationally defined as residential population density derived from WorldPop 100 m grids). Across 3920 AOIs, XGBoost (R² = 0.846, RMSE = 0.104) substantially outperforms Ordinary Least Squares regression (R² = 0.634), confirming pervasive non-linear relationships, with stable 5-fold cross-validated R² = 0.713 ± 0.115. SHAP analysis reveals four dominant drivers: Distance to Commercial Core (DistCBD), Bus Station Density within 500 m (BusDen500), Green Coverage Ratio (GreenRatio), and Building Density (BD). Critical thresholds are identified: vitality contributions decay sharply beyond approximately 4.3 km from the CBD; at least 4 bus stations within 500 m are required for meaningful transit benefit; building density delivers positive returns within a 2–30% range; and excessive green coverage above 8.5% within 500 m is associated with declining population-based vitality, a finding that reflects spatial competition between ecological land use and residential density rather than a negative effect of greenery per se. These findings provide quantitative design guidelines for precision urban renewal, moving beyond “the more, the better” planning assumptions to identify optimal intervention ranges. Full article

In coastal residential areas, the combined effects of high temperature, high humidity, and weak wind conditions during summer intensify outdoor heat exposure and reduce pedestrian thermal comfort. To investigate the influence mechanisms of tree height and spatial layout on pedestrian-level thermal comfort, this study selected a typical residential community in Chengyang District, Qingdao, as the research site. Based on field meteorological observations, an ENVI-met model was established and validated. Using the existing composite greening scenario as the baseline, three tree layout types (row, cluster, and free layouts) and four height scenarios (4 m, 6 m, 8 m, and 10 m) were configured to quantitatively compare variations in physiological equivalent temperature (PET) under different planting schemes. The results indicate that tree configuration significantly affects summer thermal comfort. Its regulatory mechanism is governed not only by air temperature reduction but also by shortwave radiation interception, longwave radiation accumulation, and shading continuity. Although low-to-medium height trees can reduce local air temperature through transpiration, their limited canopy height and shading continuity restrict their ability to effectively attenuate direct shortwave radiation at pedestrian level, and in some cases may even increase mean radiant temperature (Tmrt) and PET. In contrast, 10 m tall trees arranged in row and cluster layouts can form continuous shaded cores, with the 10 m cluster layout demonstrating the best overall performance by significantly reducing Tmrt and PET. The free layout, characterized by dispersed canopies and fragmented shading, provides relatively limited thermal comfort improvement. The findings suggest that residential greening optimization should strengthen the coordination between tree height, canopy structure, and activity spaces. Tall trees should be prioritized in children’s play areas, elderly resting areas, residential entrances, main pedestrian pathways, and west-facing sun-exposed zones, while integrating building shadows and road orientation to create a continuous yet not overly enclosed shading network, thereby enhancing summer thermal adaptability in residential areas. Full article

Dhaka, one of the world’s most densely populated megacities, has faced a severe ecological decline, with green cover plummeting from 44.80% in 1975 to approximately 24.50% by 2005. In response, urban rooftop farming has emerged as a vital adaptation strategy to mitigate the urban heat island effect and air pollution. Objective: This study evaluates the transition from “pixels to policy” by testing automated identification methods for URF to support evidence-based urban governance, specifically the 10.00% holding tax rebate offered by the Dhaka North City Corporation. Utilizing high-resolution (3 cm) drone imagery across three diverse areas of interest—representing planned, organic, and mixed-use urban fabrics, the research compares the performance of Support Vector Machines, U-Net, and Text-Segment Anything Model. Accuracy was validated using a confusion matrix based on 1000 randomly stratified sample points. The SVM model emerged as the most reliable, achieving a Kappa index of 0.74 and 100.00% user accuracy for identifying rooftop vegetation, significantly outperforming the U-Net model (Kappa 0.14). Spatial analysis quantified a distinct “green divide,” revealing that while planned residential zones achieved over 7.50% rooftop greening coverage, dense organic settlements were limited to 6.00%. The study concludes that high-accuracy SVM-based identification provides a scalable foundation for automating fiscal incentives. To bridge the socio-spatial green divide, policy interventions must shift toward inclusive greening strategies, such as vertical farming, and formal integration of URF into Dhaka’s blue-green infrastructure networks. Full article