الفهرس 
THERMAL COMFORT IN OUT DOOR URBAN SPACES IN HOT ARID CLIMATEOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Improving outdoor human thermal comfort could be considered as one of the most important targets for achieving successful open space designs. The increase of world population leads to an urgent need to diminish the energy footprint of humanity. In hot arid climate, residential neighborhoods are responsible for the high request of energy to provide for cooling needs for the occupants’ comfort (Pius Fatona, Abiodun Abiodun, Adetayo Olumide, Adesanwo Adeola and Oladunjoye Abiodun, 2013). The main problem is the non-responsive contemporary urban design to human thermal comfort and energy. Due to recent changes in the urban density and street networks of contemporary urban context, controlling micro-climate of neighborhoods imposes difficult challenges to achieve human thermal comfort. Randomized and careless urban design lead in developing uncomfortable areas between building blocks (Nouri, 2015). In this context, this thesis aims at testing specific landscape parameters that could enhance outdoor human thermal comfort. The study is limited to the microclimate at urban open space and conducted in New Borg El-Arab hot arid city according to (Köppen and Wladimir, 2011), Alexandria, Egypt. This study tries to investigate all the forces affecting the thermal comfort in urban open spaces and how to emerge them into bioclimatic approaches. Moving one step ahead, this knowledge is used to support urban designers and planners in decision making. Because if the bioclimatic approaches have been considered as the key for urban design, the outdoor human thermal comfort can be improved. The adopted methodology is based on the use of ENVI-met 4.0 software to measure four thermal indices (air temperature, relative humidity, MRT and PMV) and assess outdoor human thermal comfort in an existing neighborhood. In addition, different design scenarios that emphasize different landscape elements are also assessed. The results of this analysis depict that changing street networks, landscape design and materials could enhance the level of thermal comfort in the urban open spaces.