ABSTRACT
What makes a space successful from a climate point of view? William Whyte used time-lapse photography to study how people used outside spaces in New York. He documented the comings and goings, the rituals, the rhythms of encounters and basically what made some spaces ‘work’ and others not. He found that significant elements in the success of places related to the effects of sun, wind, trees and water. However, he found that in general such effects are almost wholly inadvertent. Sun studies and the like made for new buildings tend to be defensive in nature, aimed at gaining planning permission rather than investigations of what benefits there might be, to whom and when. (Whyte, 1980, p43). This trial and error approach to urban design is explained by Peter Bosselmann, who studied the climate in Vancouver, when he observed ‘although the relationship between a city's form and its climate has been intuitively understood, intuition cannot predict how specific future buildings will affect climate conditions’ (Bosselmann, 1998, p140). While there is still no single comprehensive model that can predict pedestrian comfort in public open spaces, recent advances in urban microclimatology that combine experimental and computational techniques make evaluation of this aspect of a person's interaction with the environment more accessible and realistic.
