The effect of wind pattern change on the environmental/climatic conditions within cities

Abstract

The labor force demand by the Industrial Revolution has led to an increase in the population of cities. This situation was followed by rapid development of urban areas with starting of nineteenth century to accommodate labor force around the industry. This situation has ended up with altering more land surfaces to buildings, car parks, roads or other structure types. However, it cannot be said that all the urbaniza tion steps are taken properly. Thus, these anthropogenic developments have affected wind flow in urban. Arbitrary built urban areas restrict the wind flow in street canyons and make it slower than the flow above the building blocks, hence reduce the cooling effect of wind at near-ground levels. However, increasing the wind speed in streets can improve thermal comfort of people by the means of convective heat transfer through the skin. Thermal comfort and wind flow patterns are important environmental issues when designing new urban areas. Starting from this point, this thesis focuses on computa tional fluid dynamics (CFD) models to observe wind flow and thermal comfort of arbitrary built urban areas in Mecidiyeko¨y, Istanbul. Mecidiyeko¨y is an arbitrarily urbanized and one of the most crowded hubs of Istanbul, which is modelled as it is and compared with alternative design scenarios in wind flow and thermal comfort results. In general, this thesis analyzes the impact of buildings on wind flow, hence thermal comfort in cities.