Abstract
With increasing global awareness of sustainable development, federal and local authorities in the UAE have developed agendas for energy efficiency in all development sectors, especially for buildings and urban development. With the belief that urban form is integral to urban sustainability, several recently developed single-family social housing neighborhoods in the UAE have shifted from conventional sprawling urban forms to more compact ones. Unfortunately, the impact of this shift on operational and cooling energy use intensities (EUIs) is unknown. Adopting a comparative computational method, this study investigates the effect of compact urban morphologies on EUIs. In addition to a case study representing conventional urban sprawls, six recently designed housing neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Al Ain were selected to represent new compact urban forms. This study uncovered an inconsistent relationship between floor area ratio (FAR) and average housing operational and cooling EUIs. To justify these results, the effects of increased lot coverage area, street grid patterns, building configurations, and climate zone on operational and cooling EUIs were studied, and all except climate zone were proven effective. This study concludes that the current design philosophy of compacting the urban form has not successfully met the Emirates Green Building Council’s (GBC) sustainable operational EUI benchmark of 90 kWh/m2/y. While further urban compactness (i.e., increased FARs) is needed, the other urban morphological measures examined in this study should be considered for achieving a more sustainable urban form for social housing.
Highlights
It is estimated that cities consume almost two-thirds of the world’s energy and a significant portion of this energy goes to operate buildings [1]
A significant decrease in the average annual operational and cooling energy use intensities (EUIs) was observed for all neighborhoods after considerably increasing their floor area ratio (FAR) in the build-out area case, which is defined as developing the housing plot to its full potential or theoretical capacity as permitted under current planning or zoning designations [33]
This entails decreasing the open spaces on the whole neighborhood level as the main purpose of this experiment is to explore the effect of more ‘compaction’ of the urban form, i.e., less open and in-between spaces on the EUIs
Summary
It is estimated that cities consume almost two-thirds of the world’s energy and a significant portion of this energy goes to operate buildings [1]. Global efforts have been focused on reducing energy consumption and its associated carbon emissions in the built environment sector These efforts are increasingly reflected in the current green building design codes and practices while both present-day and predicted targets for reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions have been set worldwide to meet this goal [2]. The compaction of urban forms requires increasing both built up area density—expressed in floor area ratio (FAR), the gross floor area permitted on a site divided by the total net area of the site [10]—and residential population density—expressed in person per hectare (pph) This would conserve building energy and strengthen the various social, cultural, and economic activities within this compacted urban environment
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