Modeling Thermal Comfort and Optimizing Local Renewal Strategies—A Case Study of Dazhimen Neighborhood in Wuhan City

Modeling thermal comfort provides quantitative evidence and parameters for effective and efficient urban planning, design, and building construction particularly in a dense and narrow inner city, which has become one of many concerns for sustainable urban development. This paper aims to develop geometric and mathematical models of wind and thermal comfort and use them to examine the impacts of six small-scale renewal strategies on the wind and thermal environment at pedestrian level in Dazhimen neighborhood, Wuhan, which is a typical case study of urban renewal project in a mega-city. The key parameters such as the solar radiation, natural convection, relative humidity, ambient crosswind have been incorporated into the mathematical models by using user-defined-function (UDF) method. Detailed temperature and velocity distributions under different strategies have been compared for the optimization of local renewal strategies. It is concluded that five rules generated from the simulation results can provide guidance for building demolition and OPEN ACCESS Sustainability 2015, 7 3110 reconstruction in a neighborhood and there is no need of large-scale demolition. Particularly, combining the local demolition and city virescence can both improve the air ventilation and decrease the temperature level in the study area.