20 2017 Urban and regional heat island adaptation measures in the Netherlands Leyre Echevarría Icaza Urban and regional heat island adaptation measures in the Netherlands Leyre Echevarría Icaza Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Department of Urbanism TOC abe.tudelft.nl Design: Sirene Ontwerpers, Rotterdam ISBN 978-94-92516-92-3 ISSN 2212-3202 © 2017 Leyre Echevarría Icaza All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author. Unless otherwise specified, all the photographs in this thesis were taken by the author. For the use of illustrations effort has been made to ask permission for the legal owners as far as possible. We apologize for those cases in which we did not succeed. These legal owners are kindly requested to contact the publisher. TOC Foreword/Epilogue The aim of this thesis is to propose urban design guidelines to positively influence the heat islands in Dutch cities and regions. As an architect and urban planner, the challenge was to provide a series of spatial planning guidelines that had to be open enough to be compatible with other urban planning priorities and accurate enough to mitigate the Urban Heat Island (UHI). This thesis is thus marked by this tension between a generic reflection on the integration of scientific findings within the vision of a larger urban planning and the need of specific scientific results for the Dutch context. In that sense we can differentiate two parts in the research: the articles with a theoretical component and the articles with a practical approach. – The articles with a theoretical component study the relevance of the phenomenon at a national and international scale, its implications (lack of comfort, increase of mortality, energy consumption…) and existing online tools to assess it (chap 2). They also investigate the relevance of the regional vision to prevent the formation of the urban heat (chap 3), and propose catalysing mapping strategies (chap 4). – The articles with a practical approach specifically study the formation of the UHI in the Netherlands at different scales: they assess the phenomenom in the existing urban environment (chap 5 and chap 6), they develop urban design guidelines for the assessment of urban heat in future development areas (chap 6) and they propose spatial guidelines for the interventions at the landscape scale (chap 7). The challenge of the 21st century urban planner´s work I have the perception that the 21st century urban planners have to face two important challenges which are multi-scale and multidisciplinary projects. Both aspects imply an increase of complexity of our discipline, thus more than ever the nature of the urban and spatial planner´s work should be kept in mind to prevent it from being diluted in the new socio-economical context. The urban planner is above all a “vision generator” and an “integrator”. The urban planner should be able to develop a multi- scale spatial vision, from which different priority levels will derive to address the numerous disciplines it should integrate. The growing availability of information and documentation that can be retrieved, systematically processed, shared, and enhanced, through mobile applications, online platforms, tablets, GPS, drones…may confuse us urban planners. The temptation is thus to overcome the data tide, with TOC over-specialisation: to concentrate the efforts in identifying data gaps and aiming to fill them with scientific and empirical research. It seems that in our efficient and sometimes over-specialised society, the generation of necessary creative, intuitive and integrative visions is lacking. Urban planners have extensive accurate knowledge over specific elements (public transport calculations, pedestrian traffic in commercial streets for retailers’ analysis, specific architectural elements...), and in turn often lack of long-term urban sustainbility analysis or an urban and regional vision coordinating the totality of urban actions. In our specialised society, the urban planners have to play an integrative role, while retaining the part of vision generators. Multi-scale dimension of the urban planners’ assignment: Cities occupy only 3% of the earth’s surface, however modern cities’ operations affect more than 75% of the globe´s surface. The global cities are more interconnected than ever, with more than 100,000 daily flights. The relationship between world-oriented cities and regions has changed dramatically. Production and consumption patterns, population growth tendency and urbanisation dynamics are simply unsustainable. Urban planners, as designers of the built environment, need to take over. Urban planning is no longer about planning the urban, it should start dealing with planning the non-urban. The traditional urban rural contraposition is no longer applicable in the 21st century. One does not exist without the other. Urban should ventilate and incorporate greenery, and rural should start to get structured and organised, as it includes a wide variety of uses: semi-industrial, agricultural, landscape, recreational and infrastructural, which are all related to urban areas, not necessarily located in the vicinity. The scale at which the global approach overlaps with the urban approach, is the regional one. Since the 1920's several groups have claimed the importance of the regional vision. The article “Regional balance for UHI mitigation” (Echevarria Icaza & Van der Hoeven, 2017) reviews the importance of the regional approach to reduce the impact of the UHI. Multidisciplinary approach of the urban planners’ assignment: Modern multidisciplinary space planning was somehow born with MacHarg in the 1970's with a multidisciplinary team of physicists, biologists, sociologists, architects, landscape designers, urban planners, and territory planners. Since then, technology has allowed a deeper and systematic analysis of a wide range of parameters: water flows, forest fragmentation, energy and moisture fluxes, anthropogenic heat emissions, imperviousness, energy consumption, waste emissions, mobility matrixes, and even crime rates, surveillance, traffic, light-switch activity, or mobile phone activity. One of the new sets of parameters to be considered are the ones related to the UHI. The UHI is one of the main climatological phenomena affecting cities nowadays. Even TOC though it generated over 30,000 excess deaths across Europe in 2003, and over 55,000 in Russia only in 2010 (Barriopedro et al. 2011), it cannot be considered as the only priority of urban planners. In order to be able to play a role as “integrators”, urban planners need to first find ways of consolidating vast and varied amounts of data in their new plans. Precisely, the article “Integrating Urban Heat Assessment in Urban Plans” strategies (Echevarria Icaza et al., 2016c) explores mapping strategies to generate creative and harmonised urban proposals which allow for the consolidation of UHI-related parameters. Leyre Echevarría Icaza TOC 8 Urban and regional heat island adaptation measures in the Netherlands TOC Contents List of Figures 16 Glossary 21 Summary 29 Samenvatting 33 Resumen 37 1 Introduction 41 1.1 Background 41 1.2 Overall UHI analysis and mitigation strategies 46 1.2.1 References at neighbourhood scale 47 1.2.2 References of urban studies 48 1.2.3 References at regional scale 50 1.2.4 References of the use of remote sensing for UHI assessment 50 1.3 Systematic approach to the UHI assessment 51 1.4 The UHI in the Netherlands 52 1.5 Problem statement and objective 57 1.6 Research questions 57 1.7 Block scheme 58 1.8 Research Scheme 59 9 Contents TOC PART A Method 2 Impacts, strategies and tools to mitigate UHI 67 2.1 Introduction 68 2.2 Materials and Methods 70 2.3 Results 71 2.3.1 Trends on urban heat islands in cities round the world 71 2.3.2 Strategies to reduce heat islands 76 2.3.2.1 At building scale 77 2.3.2.2 At city scale 78 2.3.2.3 At regional scale 79 2.3.2.4 Raising awareness among residents 80 2.3.3 Systematising estimation and adaptation measures to UHI 81 2.3.3.1 The “Decision Support System” (DSS) 81 2.3.3.2 The CE Urban Heat Island Atlas 84 2.3.3.3 The STAR tools 85 2.3.3.4 The “London unified model” (Londum) 88 2.3.3.5 The ADMS model 88 2.3.3.6 The LSSAT 89 2.3.3.7 EPA Mitigation Impact Screening Tool (MIST) 90 2.3.3.8 The Urban Microclimate tool 93 2.4 Conclusions 96 3 Regionalist principles to reduce the urban heat island effect 103 3.1 Introduction 104 3.2 Materials and Methods 107 10 Urban and regional heat island adaptation measures in the Netherlands TOC 3.3 Results 110 3.3.1 Regional territory 110 3.3.1.1 Sense of Place/The Concept of Nature 110 3.3.1.2 Regional economy 111 3.3.2 Urban containment 112 3.3.2.1 City sizes and population densities for regionally balanced environments 112 3.3.2.2 Greenery Standards 116 3.3.2.3 The Neighborhood Scale 118 3.4 Discussion 120 3.5 Conclusions 122 4 Integrating urban heat assessment in urban plans 129 4.1 Introduction 130 4.2 Methodology: overview of the role mapping as a design tool 131 4.2.1 The nature of the urban planners’ work 131 4.2.2 New parameters to be integrated in contemporary practice 132 4.2.3 Urban heat assessment 134 4.3 Results: Catalysing mapping strategies to suggest urban heat adaptation guidelines 138 4.3.1 Game-board: preliminary strategic analysis 139 4.3.2 Rhizome: integration schemes 140 4.3.3 Layering: physical overlap 143 4.3.4 Drift 150 4.4 Conclusion 151 4.5 Discussion 152 11 Contents TOC PART B Results 5 The urban heat island effect in Dutch city centres – Identifying relevant indicators and first explorations 161 5.1 Introduction 162 5.1.1 UHI studies despite the lack of micro-measurements 162 5.1.2 Bridging the gap between scientific and applied knowledge 163 5.1.3 Remote sensing as a tool to identify, mitigate and quantify urban heat.