Abstract
Climate change will bring more heat extremes to the already warm tropical areas in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The resulting surge in cooling demand will only make the thermal discomfort in tropical cities even worse. This paper presents evidence to the approaching air conditioned cooling load deluge and shows why the air conditioned management of cooling load is particularly problematic in the tropics. It then presents the technical, institutional and cultural challenges to passive climate-sensitive design in the tropics and posits three ideas as part of the way forward: reformulation of thermal pleasure in the tropics, linking the ‘in’ and the ‘out’ at neighbourhood scale and provision of adaptive opportunities varied by activity patterns. Research approaches to advance these ideas are also discussed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 250-259 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Urban Climate |
| Volume | 23 |
| Early online date | 11 Jan 2017 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Mar 2018 |
Keywords
- tropical urban climate
- urban design
- thermal comfort
- cooling load
- urban heat islands
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Building and Construction
- Architecture
- Urban Studies
Documents and Links
- Emmanuel, R. (2017) Urban Climate article
This is the author final version of the article originally published in: Urban Climate on 11 January 2017 by Elsevier. The final publisher version of this article is available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2017.01.002. © 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
