A Field Study on Climate Comfortable Conditions of Urban Public Open Spaces in Marginal Season of Winter Cities

Abstract

In order to study the importance of climate comfortable conditions of urban public open spaces in marginal season of winter cities for people's outdoor activities, first, the paper ascertained the specific times of Harbin's outdoor and marginal seasons based on meteorological data from 1984 to 2013. Second, this paper conducted field survey, which includes in situ measurement and structured interview, in three typical urban public open spaces in marginal season. The calculated results show that Harbin has an outdoor season from Apr 25th to Oct 1st, and the spring marginal season is from Apr 4th to Apr 24th, the fall marginal season is from Oct 2nd to Oct 24th. At the same time, the results of in situ measurement show that there is great room for the improvement of climatic conditions of urban public open spaces in the marginal season of winter cities, especially the public open spaces near to the high-rise buildings and waterfront, and the apparent temperature in these two open spaces is about 3°C lower than the air temperature simultaneously. The results of structured interview show that people would like to do some outdoor activities when it is nice weather outside in marginal season, and the regression analysis results show that people's outdoor activities time are severely affected by climate comfortable conditions in marginal season. They feel that fine microclimate is much more important for a person than enough facilities and green landscape of urban public open spaces in marginal season. The paper suggested that the specific times of outdoor and marginal seasons should be added to some urban design guidance as a specification in urban planning practice, and this paper advanced some urban planning strategies related to urban design to improve climatic conditions of urban public open spaces in the marginal seasons of winter cities.