When addressing urban heat problems, climateconscious urban design has been assuming that urban water bodies such as canals, ditches or ponds cool down their surroundings. Recent research shows that this is not necessarily the case and that urban water bodies may actually have a warming effect, particularly during late summer season nights. There are however indications that water can have a cooling potential if brought together with the right shading, evaporation and ventilation strategies. Yet, it is not clear how this should be achieved. Knowledge on such spatial configurations should thus be developed and made available to design practice. This challenge is directly addressed by the “REALCOOL” project, a research aiming to define design prototypes showing the physical processes behind the effective cooling potential of urban water bodies, that design professionals can take as conceptual design frameworks.
This paper addresses the first loop of the REALCOOL’s research through designing (RTD) method, in particular how different prototype design options were created and tested. We address the identification of testbeds – 3D visualisations of common Dutch urban water bodies upon which the design experiments were conducted through different configurations of shading, evaporation and ventilation strategies. These experiments were targeted at improving outdoor human thermal sensation. We further present how the different design options were tested against micrometeorological simulations, expert judgements and external feedback from design o!ices, consultants and municipalities. We explore the aesthetical, functional, economical and maintenance challenges upon adding a thermal regulation role to the common infrastructural and/or aesthetical conception of urban water bodies. The paper concludes about the cooling effectiveness of the outcomes of this first RTD loop and about the way these will inform the subsequent RTD loops.
Source: Cortesão, J., Lenzholzer, S., Klok, L., Jacobs, C. M. J., & Kluck, J. (2017). Creating prototypes for cooling urban water bodies. In ECLAS Conference 2017 Proceedings (pp. 349-364) https://edepot.wur.nl/448638