Urban climate adaptation: an interdisciplinary research experience empowering architecture and urbanism education

Abstract

The world’s cities are growing in size and number. At the same time, the global climate change rises global average temperatures as well as increase weather extreme events. Sao Paulo, the 5th urbanized region in the world, has currently more than 21 million inhabitants and recent studies alert for the increased frequency of extreme climate/weather events in the city. In this context, this work presents an interdisciplinary research experience, based at the Architecture and Urbanism school in partnership with the Atmospheric Sciences’ Department, approaching the interdependencies between urban morphology, green infrastructure, and microclimate in São Paulo, aiming to discuss planning, urban and building design alternatives to counterbalance urban warming effects in a subtropical changing climate. The research team, led by an architecture researcher and an associate researcher from atmospheric sciences, includes a post-doc researcher, graduate and undergraduate students, engaging architecture, urban design, planning, and meteorology dealing with the role of planning, urban and building design for climate change adaptation. This paper briefly summarizes what we have learnt with remote sensing, measurements and numerical simulation encompassing the metropolitan, the neighbourhood and the building scales and discuss the results of an interdisciplinary research empowering architectural education in different levels.