A Human-Centered Approach to Enhance Urban Resilience, Implications and Application to Improve Outdoor Comfort in Dense Urban Spaces

Abstract

The concept of resilience in urban design and decision-making is principally focused on change instead of resistance over an adaptive process. For cities, this concept in a broader scale means how to withstand unforeseen events that will fundamentally amend the city’s wellbeing, rather than being stabilized and protected. The same concept is applicable for outdoor comfort as an adaptive approach to compensate extreme heat waves and health risk conditions. This chapter presents methods, tools, and applications to enhance urban resilience at a micro scale looking for correlations between environmental factors and human behavior in terms of outdoor comfort.

Keywords

• microclimate
• outdoor comfort
• urban modeling
• urban data
• sensing