| Urbanization involves the great change in human behavior, lifestyle, and more importantly urban ecosystem. Due to the increase in demands for dwelling space, the increase in urbanization poses serious increases in energy consumption for lighting, heating, and cooling. Although architects have been trying to improve the performance of building internally though the use of new technologies, a few have been considering the imperative of external influence on the urban environment. Urban structures and their dense adjacency causes the solar radiation gets reflected from one surface to another rather than releasing back to the upper atmosphere. The heat gets transferred into building during the daytime and releases back to the atmosphere after sunset which makes the temperature inside the city higher than rural areas. The urban heat island is the result from this slow, and subtle movement of heat exchange. Suggestion of making wider canyon will help to improve the rate of heat transfer, but due to the high density of urban structure, this idea is not practical. Moreover, the understanding of the radiative heat transfer process within a wider canyon and a regular urban canyon has not been explicitly expressed. This thesis presents the study of interactions between building envelopes and their surrounding urban context with the emphasis on the surface material properties and the radiative heat transfer process in relationship to the urban spatial configuration. It is aimed to improve microclimate heat transfer conditions and potentially mitigate the urban heat island phenomenon. |
