Legal regulations for urban ventilation

Abstract

The performance of urban ventilation correlates strongly with air quality and thermal comfort in urban areas. A good living environment that includes such features is a citizens’ right that needs to be secured for the people living in urban areas. Proper legal regulation is necessary to secure this right. In this chapter, we discuss the existing legal regulations concerning urban ventilation. There are two concepts for legal regulations: prescriptive-based code and performance-based code. We discuss the Building Standard Law in Japan as an example of a prescriptive- based code and the Air Ventilation Assessment System (AVAS) in Hong Kong as a candidate for future performance-based codes. It is thought that legal regulation is not currently sufficient to ensure the aforementioned right, because the correlation between the regulations and urban ventilation is not clear. We also refer to studies on how to properly evaluate ventilation performance, and we then discuss the concepts of “horizontal ventilation paths” and “vertical ventilation paths.”.