A Review and Insights for Eleven Years of Urban Microclimate Research Towards a New Egyptian ERA of Low Carbon, Comfortable and Energy-Efficient Housing Typologies

Abstract

Since the mid-1970s, urban development in Egypt has sprawled far from the distinguished compact arid built environment, as the court-yarded housing typologies that completed the vernacular picture of desert architecture have been discarded in the early 20th century. This has motivated urban microclimate research in Egypt. The main objective was initially to improve outdoor thermal comfort. Therefore, Egyptian research started with assessing different existing patterns for the sake of climate responsive and sustainable urban design practice characterized with low carbon, thermal comfort and energy efficiency in such a hot arid conditions. That is why the review workflow of this article has followed a design progress workflow that led to solving design complexities with regard to generating housing urban forms on a microclimate basis rather than an article regular review workflow in order to extract the research gaps and conclude insights. After discussing a general framework for generating housing sustainable design identified from the concluded gaps, the main conclusion is a vision and a call to integrate the Urban microclimate-Building passiveness-Renewables design dimensions, UBR, towards the evolution of a new era of energy efficient housing typologies and a 5th generation of Egyptian sustainable cities where the 1st generation of new Egyptian cities started 1970s.