Climate-Sensitive Urban Design Measures for Improving the Wind Environment for Pedestrians in a Transit-Oriented Development Area

Abstract

This study examines the blocks around the main station of the Kaohsiung Railway Underground Project in which the 400 m around station will be redeveloped. Two concepts, sustainable urban design and TOD (transit oriented development), were integrated to develop a new planning approach called the original Green-TOD. Among the key issues of Green-TOD, the relation between pedestrian space design and air ventilation is a crucial issue for providing pedestrians with amenities in a tropical climate like Kaohsiung. In this study, wind speed and wind direction, which were selected from the two main high traffic periods during the summer, served as the primary simulation settings of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and wind distribution between roadside-based and street-block-based developments were compared. Major implemented policies for urban design, including the incentives for floor area ratio (FAR), building mass and layout, and open space design measures, are explicitly addressed as well. The results of the CFD simulation show the quality of the ventilation can be improved through land-use control measures.