FutureCityLab (ftr.ct.lb)
ftr.ct.lb is a collaboration of leading engineers, universities and scientists worldwide in or- der to elaborate a (positive) urban vision for the next generations.
This vision should help to establish the planning directions that we need to take today.
See more visions and join the discussion here ftrctlb.com
We love 2050!
Urban Heat Island Effect
ftrctlb: How does the change in climate influence your topic in your city.
Please also describe what is the change in climate conditions for your city.
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Urban Heat Island Effect is one of the major factor which change the climatic condition. The UHI heats up the urban areas than in rural condition and hotter environment faces more hotter degrees in temperature. Paris has hot weather in summer, due to UHI, Paris was stroke by heat wave in 2003. So, climate change would increase the possibilities of major heat wave in future.
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ftrctlb: How does the change in demographics influence your topic in your city.
Please also describe what is the projected demographics in your city.
As people are moving towards cities, the population of the Paris will going to rise. The increase in population will also increase in the density of the city, and infrastructure. More infrastructure, the city would be covered by the urban surfaces i.e the impervious surfaces which is directly proportional to the UHI.
The second important fact is the high density people increase the Anthropogenic heat emission. Anthropogenic heat is also increasing the UHI in urban scenario. It is not the major factor but this is hard to deal with.
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ftrctlb: What are the 3 other topics that would influence your topics.
Please let us know what are the links.
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The three different factors that would influence UHI are
1) Regional Climate change changes in ecosystem. The change in ecosystem is a vast area where the adoptation of the living beings might be complex things, as small organism like algae, bacterial are faster in adoptation but other plants may not be, so the major changes can be seen in foods.
2) Green house gases.
3) Impervious surfaces (such as concrete, asphalts e.t.c) It means lack of greenery and less evopotranspiration.
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ftrctlb: What is the most important detail in your vision in regards to your topic.
Please present the research that this one is based on (link to wiki page).
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The most important factor regarding my vision is the material of the urban surfaces.
Green spaces.
Technologies or built in system to cool down buildings.
In future, the inventions which existed in present day is more to be use in day to day life. In the history of Paris, it can be seen the urban transformation is not dynamic as in other cities. It has preserved it’s identity from middle ages. So, in future to the city’s first aspects would be to preserve the infrastructure they have but also implementing sustainability, and using techniques that would be required in that time period. As Paris has old cities which would be adopted to the environmental conditions and with which other new technologies would also be implemented.
http://vinacciaintegraldesign.blogspot.com/2009/07/solar-trees.html
1) What is the greatest challenge your foresee in your city’s future?
2) Do you believe the “Without Oil World” design approach will shape our future cities?
3) As a climate engineer, how do you believe we should work to reduce the UHI effect in an urban scenario for the future? In building design? In urban landscapes?
4) Overall, what do you imagine our cities will be like in 2050?
In this image, the facade is covered by a cloak of ferns, this visualises the green architecture evolving in different modes. The green wall not only provides visual pleasure and greening in cityscape, but, it equally provides the cooling effect on both sides of the wall. This can be one of the alternative to cool the urban condition. This technique does not complicate the structural wall but also gives the freedom of use of building materials. The possibility in existing infrastructure might deals with these kind of interventions in the given urban conditions.
http://dirt.asla.org/2009/08/05/the-dark-side-of-green-architecture-in-paris/
for more information, click here: The Honeycomb Project
Does Urban Heat Island effect exaggerate global warming trends?
It’s Urban Heat Island effect
“A paper by Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph, and Patrick Michaels, an environmental studies professor at the University of Virginia, concludes that half of the global warming trend from 1980 to 2002 is caused by Urban Heat Island.” (McKitrick & Michaels)
While urban areas are undoubtedly warmer than surrounding rural areas, this has had little to no impact on warming trends.
When compiling temperature records, NASA GISS go to great pains to remove any possible influence from Urban Heat Island Effect. They compare urban long term trends to nearby rural trends. They then adjust the urban trend so it matches the rural trend. The process is described in detail on the NASA website (Hansen 2001).
They found in most cases, urban warming was small and fell within uncertainty ranges. Surprisingly, 42% of city trends are cooler relative to their country surroundings as weather stations are often sited in cool islands (eg - a park within the city). The point is they’re aware of UHI and rigorously adjust for it when analysing temperature records.
This confirms a peer review study by the NCDC (Peterson 2003) that did statistical analysis of urban and rural temperature anomalies and concluded “Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures… Industrial sections of towns may well be significantly warmer than rural sites, but urban meteorological observations are more likely to be made within park cool islands than industrial regions.”
Another more recent study (Parker 2006) plotted 50 year records of temperatures observed on calm nights, the other on windy nights. He concluded “temperatures over land have risen as much on windy nights as on calm nights, indicating that the observed overall warming is not a consequence of urban development”.
Comparing rural to urban trends
The paper Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China (Jones et al 2008) finds urban temperature trends to be little different to rural trends. The paper begins by looking at 5 sites in and around London. Figure 1 shows absolute temperatures, clearly indicating a UHI influence on the urban sites at London Weather Centre (brown) and St. James Park (dark blue). The coolest record is the rural based Rothamsted (dark green). However, the excess urban warmth has no effect on the temperature trend - all sites show the same overall trend.
Figure 1: Annual temperature trends for five sites in and around London. Brown and dark blue are urban sites, green are rural.
A similar comparison was made between two sites in Vienna. Again, the absolute temperature is greater for the urban site but both sites show near identical trends.
Figure 2: Annual temperature trends for two sites in Vienna – Hohewarte in the center (brown) and the rural location of Grossenzersdorf (green).
Comparing rural and urban networks in China
So established urban areas show the same trends as surrounding rural areas. What about urban areas that are still developing? China, in contrast to Europe, has experienced rapid economic growth over the last 30 years with a dramatic increase in its city areas. If there were to be significant urban-related warming, it ought to be in this region and over recent decades. Figure 3 compares a range of temperature datasets:
Figure 3: Annual average temperature anomalies. Jones et all (dotted green and brown) is a dataset of 42 rural and 42 urban sites. Li et al (solid green and brown) is a homogenized dataset of 42 rural and 40 urban sites. Li (blue) is a non-homogenized set of 728 stations, urban and rural. CRUTEM3v (red) is a land-only data set (Brohan et al., 2006). This plot uses the 1954–83 base period.
That there are hardly any differences between the six series tells us several things. Small datasets of 40 stations show the same result as the 728 station dataset. In other words, for a region of this size, the average can be constructed from a limited number of sites, implying that for the 728 station network there is considerable redundancy.
As the scale increases, the overall impact of homogeneity adjustments diminishes. This might be a bit heartbreaking for those hard working boffins who spend hundreds of hours pouring meticulously over station data, ensuring the data is all homogenised (but of course, they don’t do it just to calculate global trends).
And of course, the most significant finding: the trend is the same for both urban and rural groups over any of the periods. Even in the case of developing urban areas, when averaged out over large areas, urban heat island has little impact on the warming trend.
Written by John Cook
Urban Heat Island Effect
City: Paris
The image of 2020 was dealing with Urban greeneries with the concept that future cities might uses sky transportation rather than land, so all the infrastructure for land transportation might be useless and people goes for Urban Farming in those lands to feed more dense population.
For the year 2030, same image would be used for Urban heat Island effect. Basically, the image of 2030 is trying to show that the urban farming might convert into aesthetics of the city again. Flying cars and skyline metros can be in prominent use. And some old traditional building might existed in old form but many of other building might get renovated with new facades material which can absorb heat energy. So, use of these kind of material, green areas and permeable pavements would reduce the UHI.
Differential Views: playing the devil’s advocate.
An interesting argument has come to my attention. While researching population, demographics and urban densification, I ran across some research with an alternate view. By the author Ben J. Wattenberg we have
Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future.
Wattenberg states, very plainly and with interesting data, that the projected “10-billion” population for the future is an overestimate. He says a family averages around 1.8 children. Eventually parents will die thus a decrease in population.
So the question posed from his argument becomes: How do we focus on density at a temporary scale?
is this a valid argument? I do no know. There is a lot of data that projects an exponential growth in population, but if not for anything else, the idea behind this is quite interesting. We tend to overestimate for those “just-in-case” scenarios, which all to often does not happen. As Wattenberg also addresses in his book, when women move to cities, they become more independant; they get more of an “I can do anything” mentality. This fuels their role to be less of a stay-at-home mom and more of a “power woman”.
The data also suggest that a vast majority of the population in cities have less kids. My Uncle and Aunt in California have no kids. A good friend in New Jersey has 6 siblings in his immediate family. Another friend in Kansas has never been married and she has no kids. There is a natural balance to certain situations, that suggest the population increase will not be as drastic as 10 billion.
Regardless of right or wrong, there is still the Truth that 75% of the population will move to cities in 2050. There could be 7.5 billion people living in cities or 4.5 billion, the facts remain the same. The city will become dense, and we need to understand how to solve it. Transportation, water, energy use, all become major factors for designing the future; and this is where ftr.ct.lb. comes into play.
This image was created solution for Urban Heat Island Effect. For future scenario of this image is derived from a theory that the asphalt road emits heat in very large amount in urban areas. The assumption is made to replace the asphalts roads with alternative roads which absorbs the radiation from the sun.
Here, the solar roadways can be foreseen as the alternatives for the asphalt roads which not only absorbs the heat but also produces the electricity and these roads designed for electric cars. Therefore, the emission of the greenhouse gases and CO2 would be reduced by half.
The solar roadways are introduced by Scott Brusaw.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwHtWSFmV1Q
Another solution was porous pavements and cool roofs, these pavements also plays important role in the heat absorbtion.
The roof gardens and intregating infrastructures with greeneries. These are the basic mitigation for the UHI reduction.
This picture is the first step of visualizing the future in Paris. The change in population in the next 20 years, will yield a significantly larger percentage of the elderly in Paris (somewhere around 40% of the population, compared to the 15% we are at today). This demographic change is a large result of the Baby Boomer effect after WWII.
This vision shows the changes that would need to be made. In such a densely populated city, special accommodations would be required. While a slight jab at humor, the sign itself “Elderly Crossing” signifies the demographic change in Paris. Just because people are older, does not mean they are willing to change their lifestyles, or move out of a bustling city. Therefore, the city will change in order to accommodate this growing age group.
This picture is the first step of visualizing the future in Moscow. In 2011, this 16-lane road is the main transportation in and out of the city of Moscow. However, as Moscow’s density (and population) is decreasing, the need for such a highway decreases as well.
This vision shows the ability to control the lanes themselves. They can be closed off to vehicles, direct how many lanes goes which way - much like what happens around a sports arena before and after an event in the States. Here it allows for a market which would increase the social interaction between the stores and the residence along this mega-highway.
