Abstract
Urban green infrastructure, especially shade trees, offers benefits to the urban residential environment by mitigating direct incoming solar radiation on building facades, particularly in hot settings. Understanding the impact of different tree locations and arrangements around residential properties has the potential to maximize cooling and can ultimately guide urban planners, designers, and homeowners on how to create the most sustainable urban environment. This research measures the cooling effect of tree shade on building facades through an outdoor urban physical scale model. The physical scale model is a simulated neighborhood consisting of an array of concrete cubes to represent houses with identical artificial trees. We tested and compared 10 different tree densities, locations, and arrangement scenarios in the physical scale model. The experimental results show that a single tree located at the southeast of the building can provide up to 2.3 °C hourly cooling benefits to east facade of the building. A two-tree cluster arrangement provides more cooling benefits (up to 6.6 °C hourly cooling benefits to the central facade) when trees are located near the south and southeast sides of the building. The research results confirm the cooling benefits of tree shade and the importance of wisely designing tree locations and arrangements in the built environment.
Highlights
The demands of a rapidly growing population has resulted in a shift toward larger and more expansive urban areas [1]
We developed an outdoor physical scale model with buildings and trees to represent a typical residential parcel with detached single-family house and surrounding buildings in the City of Tempe, Arizona (33.4◦ N, 111.9◦ W)
Tree density is the total number of trees used per tree density, tree locations, and tree arrangements
Summary
The demands of a rapidly growing population has resulted in a shift toward larger and more expansive urban areas [1]. To alleviate urban thermal stress, to promote urban ecosystem services, and to improve human and environmental health, various heat mitigation and energy saving strategies are applied, including employing reflective/white roof, adding photovoltaics to capture the solar energy, and using vegetation to create urban green infrastructure. Among all of these strategies, vegetation as one of the most important components of urban green infrastructure, is becoming an integral feature of urban designs [8]. The question that remains is how to best integrate urban green infrastructure with the transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial infrastructure to maximize the environmental benefits that are offered by the green infrastructure
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