Relationships between building characteristics, urban form and building energy use in different local climate zone contexts: An empirical study in Seoul

Abstract

The influence of building context on the relationship between building and its energy use has been attracting attention. However, most studies simply defined building contextual areas as within an arbitrary distance and measured their form with commonly used planning and design indicators. Such an approach often suffers from the lack of justifications on the context area size, confounding effects between indicators, and weak connection between those indicators and urban energy policy. This study uses the local climate zone (LCZ) as buildings’ thermal context area, and investigates the relationship between building characteristics, urban form, and residential building energy use in different LCZ contexts in Seoul, South Korea. A linear mixed model is employed to examine this relationship. Results show that LCZs as different contextual forms not only significantly influence building energy, but also impact the effects of building characteristics on building energy use. The results are further compared to another model with zoning classes, a widely used development control tool in planning, as contextual areas, and find the latter has much smaller influences. The findings suggest a promising application of the LCZ framework in understanding the form-energy relationship in complex urban environments and in energy-oriented urban planning.