Wind Engineering in Large Scale Urban Design

Large scale urban and suburban development or redevelopment offers an opportunity to use wind engineering in street orientation and building density to encourage summer breeze penetration or inhibit chilling effects of winter winds. This is not new. Egyptians used it while building the pyramids and the Romans orientated streets in garrison towns to exclude harsh winter winds. In more recent times concentration of airborne vehicular pollution in street canyons has been mitigated using wind engineering studies. The benefits of wind engineering during urban design are more difficult to achieve after street orientation and building density has been decided. Boundary layer wind tunnels studies and computational fluid dynamics modeling are the principal tools for this area of wind engineering. Urban planners and designers need to work closely with wind engineers during the early stages of design, before street patterns and building densities are decided in order to achieve the maximum benefits.