Microclimatic response to urban morphology: The case of Turin

The human contribution to the climate crisis has long been a topic of interest to the scientific community. The motivation of this thesis is to investigate the impact of human settlement on the course of climate change, by analyzing the role of the urban morphology of the cities on the urban microclimate. The methodology that has been followed can be broken down into following key phases: scientific background, mapping, site analysis, simulation, discussion, conclusion. Following this structure, the first part of the thesis seeks to illuminate the main concepts of the study and presents a selection of practices prior to this thesis, with a similar scope to the one of its own. The city of Turin was considered as an initial macro scale case study, which was subjected to a classification through mapping, to determine different types of urban fabric. These categories served as a pool of micro scale case studies, from which a representative plot for each category has been selected to be examined both through site analysis and microclimatic simulations carried out through ENVI-met software. Paying specific attention to supporting the reliability of the research, this comparison was carried out by setting common parameters within the urban characteristics (built/unbuilt ratio, horizontal greenery ratio and asphalt ratio) of the selected plots. The outputs of the simulation made it possible to distinguish between the microclimatic responses to each type of urban fabric, through an evaluation of the key environmental values, such as potential air temperature, surface temperature, PET (physical equivalent temperature) and wind speed. In light of the above-mentioned methodology and mentality, the core focus of the thesis is to deal with the significance of studying the form of the cities as a method of investigating climate change related vulnerabilities and adaptation responses. The findings prompt rethinking of the way to approach the challenge of climate crisis and encourage generating urban scale visions regarding adaptation and mitigation strategies.