The role of neighborhood morphology in enhancing thermal comfort and resident?s satisfaction

The unilateral development of built environments in cities leads to imbalances in climatic conditions and micro-climates, followed by indicators such as thermal comfort. Researchers identified the effect of urban morphology's geometry, shape, orientation, and mass-space combination on climate change. Also, the influential role of urban greenspaces in enhancing thermal comfort has been studied. Some results show that strengthening urban greenspaces, regardless of the orientation and proportions of the surrounding space, in some cases can prevent the proper circulation of airflow and adverse effects on thermal comfort. In this research, 10 models of neighborhoods in Tehran (the capital of Iran) were studied based on numerical calculation methods and CFD simulations. These simulations are performed by ENVI-met software, which is well-known software in this field. This study investigates which pattern and geometry in the composition of these spaces, with a constant fraction of the building, green spots, and water and paths, could better enhance thermal comfort. The results show that patterns with non-linear structure and a mass of porous spaces in which green spots are scattered have the best results in enhancing thermal comfort. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).