The Urban Heat Island effect concerns the higher air temperature in urban environment with respect to the rural one. This phenomenon has been well known for hundreds of years, but it has been experimentally studied only for the last few decades and in large metropolis. The paper reports on the experimental results obtained during the period 2010–2011 in a medium size city of Italy by the resear...

Climate sensitive urban planning and building design require detailed information on effects of a changing climate. To simulate thermal building performance appropriate data are required as “standardized weather files”. But as historic weather records cannot be used to model building performance for future climate, synthetic “future weather” data are necessary. Here we present the steps to deri...

Heat-wave risk in cities is determined both by regional climate evolutions and by cities size and shape change, because they can impact heat island effect. Land planning and urban transport policies, due to their long-lasting impact on cities shape, can therefore play a role in heat-wave risk mitigation. However, the link between these policies and resulting change in urban heat island is far f...

To a large extent, this thesis will investigate how 13th Street was successfully revitalized using a strategy similar to that of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street Program, a broadly applied framework for the revitalization of historic commercial centers in downtown communities nationwide. The success of the Main Street program, as outlined in its Four-Point Approach to ...

1 VIZARD, C.G, RIMMER, D.L, PLESS-MULLOLI, T, SINGLETON, I, & AIR, V.S. 2 Identifying contemporary and historic sources of soil polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins 3 and polychlorinated dibenzofurans in an industrial urban setting. Science of the Total 4 Environment 2006, 370(1), 61-69. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2006.06.006 5 6 Identifying contemporary and historic sources of soil 7 polychlorinated...

In the Macao Peninsula, the high population density (49,763 inhabitants/km2) and the lack of control over the number of vehicles (460 vehicles/km) have led to an increase in urban pollution. To provide useful information to local government and urban planners, this paper investigates the spatial distribution of traffic noise in the Macao Peninsula. The interactions among urban form, traffic flo...

Urban renovation projects, which have led to the conversion of port areas through a new vision of waterfronts as elements of the potential development of the urban system in its entirety, have spread since the early 1950s and now some port cities are able to trigger some mechanisms which, even if they are the result of some processes that have been activated for decades and which are still evol...