We present an integrated, three dimensional, model of urban canopy, building energy and radiosity, for early stage urban designs and test it on four urban morphologies. All sub-models share a common descriptions of the urban morphology, similar to 3D urban design master plans and have simple parameters. The canopy model is a multilayer model, with a new discrete layer approach that does not rel...

Climate change is increasingly exacerbating existing population health hazards, as well as resulting in new negative health effects. Flooding is one particularly deadly example of its amplifying and expanding effect on public health. This systematic review considered evidence linking green building strategies in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design® (LEED) Rating System with the po...

Climate sensitive urban planning and building design require detailed information on effects of a changing climate. To simulate thermal building performance appropriate data are required as “standardized weather files”. But as historic weather records cannot be used to model building performance for future climate, synthetic “future weather” data are necessary. Here we present the steps to deri...

Three dimensional (3D) building models are increasingly necessary for urban planning, tourism, etc. How to effectively describe the architectural objects becomes a key point due to the fact that the urban buildings extremely vary in height, sizes, shapes, textures, etc. This paper presents a model for exactly describing urban 3D buildings for large-scale urban true orthoimage generation. This m...

In urban planning and management, data sharing and integration are always problematic because urban datasets are heterogeneous and scattered in different domains and organisations. This paper introduces the research work being carried within the Virtual Environment Planning (VEPS) project. Based on a loosely-coupled mediator system and Open Geospatial Consortium’s Web Services (OWS) architectur...

This paper describes an improved model for multiple building diffraction modeling based on the uniform theory of diffraction (UTD). A well-known problem in conventional uniform theory of diffraction (CUTD) is multiple-edge transition zone diffraction. Here, higher order diffracted fields are used in order to improve the result; hence, we use higher order diffraction coefficients to improve a hy...

Economic tools and regulatory systems for the urban environment 60 Land use and strategic urban planning 61 Spatial planning on the urban periphery 61 Mixed use planning and urban design policies 61 Transport planning and management 62 Preserving cultural heritage 63 Use of green space in urban areas 63 Urban agriculture and forestry 63 Integrated approaches to urban management 64 Site planning...

Convective heat transfer coefficients for external building surfaces are essential in building energy simulation (BES) to calculate convective heat gains and losses from building facades and roofs to the environment. These coefficients are complex functions of: building geometry, building surroundings, local air flow patterns and temperature differences. A microclimatic analysis in a typical ur...