Including Urban Heat Island in Bioclimatic Early-Design Phases: A Simplified Methodology and Sample Applications

Urban heat island and urban‐driven climate variations are recognized issues and may considerably affect the local climatic potential of free‐running technologies. Nevertheless, green design and bioclimatic early‐design analyses are generally based on typical rural climate data, without including urban effects. This paper aims to define a simple approach to considering urban shapes and expected effects on local bioclimatic potential indicators to support early‐design choices. Furthermore, the proposed approach is based on simplifying urban shapes to simplify analyses in early‐design phases. The proposed approach was applied to a sample location (Turin, temperate climate) and five other climate conditions representative of Eurasian climates. The results show that the inclusion of the urban climate dimension considerably reduced rural HDD (heating degree‐days) from 10% to 30% and increased CDD (cooling degree‐days) from 70% to 95%. The results reveal the importance of including the urban climate dimension in early‐design phases, such as building programming in which specific design actions are not yet defined, to support the correct definition of early‐design bioclimatic analyses