Integrated Urban Climatic Sensitive Strategies for High Density Urban Planning and Design: A Case Study in Hong Kong

High-density living makes cities more efficient in the natural resource usage by decreasing the land use and energy usage. However, the planning and design of a high-density city need to solve the serious environmental problems that arise from both rapid urbanization and climate change. This research aims to allow urban planners and architects a set of practical and integrated urban climatic sensitive strategies for urban planning and design to improve the high-density urban living environment. Besides the knowledge and skills in architecture and urban design, a number of new techniques are adopted in this research, including morphological modeling, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Geographic Information System (GIS), and statistical modeling.;Particularly, this research aims to bridge two gaps: 1) the one between different spatial scales, i.e. from urban scale to building scale: how to downscale the mitigation strategy knowledge in the large scale to the small scale; 2) another gap between the different effects of single mitigation strategy on different urban climatic aspects, i.e. natural ventilation performance and air pollutant dispersion: How to improve both of them by planning and design practice, but not to cause conflict with each other, and how to choose appropriate strategies based on particular requirements for each design project. In this research, the morphological modeling method was developed based on GIS to evaluate the urban permeability in the urban scale. CFD simulation ( sst kappa -- o model for turbulence and Eulerian model for species transportation) was conducted to downscale the knowledge on urban permeability from the urban scale to the neighborhood scale. All of the modeling methods used in this research was validated by cross comparing with the reliable experimental wind tunnel data.;Statistical models, such as linear regression analysis and hypothesis test, were applied for the modeling result analysis. Based on the analysis results, the knowledge at different planning and design scales were provided for scientific decision-making. For the first thing, the importance of various urban planning and design indexes to the urban environment was examined. Consequently, it provides clear message to policy makers which planning or design indexes should be modified to improve urban environment. Secondly, the performance of various planning and design strategies was analyzed and discussed together in parametric studies for the cross comparison. The policy makers could know how to choose appropriate strategies based on the particular environmental issues and how much modification is needed. Thirdly, the outcomes of this research is systematic and helpful to make the urban and architecture design corporate well with the corresponding urban planning strategies to efficiently improve environmental quality. Last but not least, this study is based on compact urban planning and design, so that all of suggested strategies do not decrease the land use efficiency. The implementations in urban planning and design are direct, practical and accurate enough for the planners and designers.