Surfaces of Urban Life: Design Opportunities for Addressing Climate and Comfort across Scales

Design with Life, Energy and sustainability, Essay, Forrest Meggers, High Density, Urban Paradigms

Architecture&climate, Built environment, City challenge, Climate concern, Comfort, Consumption, Contamination, Designing Climate, Ecology, Ecosystem, Environmental degradation, Essay, Global Awareness, Heat Island Effect, Interiors, Materials, Matter, New paradigms, Science, Solar radiation, Surface, Temperature, Thermal comfort, Urban conditions, Urban Development, Urban environment, Urban infrastructure, Urban Paradigms, Urban research, Ventilation, Visualization

This essay is an excerpt of "Design with Life" by Mitchell Joachim and Maria Aiolova from Terreform ONE, published by Actar Publishers -- https://lccn.loc.gov/2019933631

While we have achieved unprecedented infrastructural feats, technical developments, and increased prosperity, our urbanity has also created the grandest challenges we have ever faced. The societal successes that enabled our massive urban expansion have simultaneously enabled our intellectual capabilities to recognize these problems. We can now characterize and predict with confidence the very real and dire consequences of unchecked resource consumption and environmental degradation. The urban climate is full of dangerous positive feedback loops that models show are driving conditions to be less and less conducive to life (Meggers et al. 2016; Bruelisauer et al. 2014; Allegrini, Dorer, and Carmeliet 2012; Salata et al. 2016).