The expansion of urbanization leads to increases in urban populations and manmade constructions. Likewise, problems like changing local climates negatively affect urban heat islands and human outdoor thermal comfort. This paper is based on recent studies on the effects of green spaces and plants on the microclimate and thermal comfort of recent years. The topics studied included physical properties of plants, location and vegetation cover, planting densities and crown density, plant element, leaf type, planting patterns and arrangement, and Albedo. The results of the review revealed that several factors with effects on the cooling effect of plants have not received adequate attention in previous studies yet. These include the effects of patterns, arrangement of various plant species, different tree forms and shrubs, the distribution and connection of green space patches in the landscape, the direction of the planting rows in different wind conditions, among others. By the end of this review, suggestions could be made about what possible future studies could undertake to do by way of adopting more precise and comprehensive approaches to different characteristics of plants, different landscape patterns, and the effects of different arrangements of elements in terms of microclimate improvement.

This study seeks to find appropriate landscape patterns of campus based on students’ preferences. A photo questionnaire containing scenes of different types of campus landscapes was distributed among 200 students in University of Tabriz, Iran. The results emphasized the importance of vegetation, seating areas and water features of campuses. Also, students prefer open spaces consisting of lawn and grass (M = 3.31, S.D. = 1.00). Students also prefer a campus, which has a natural base, landscape elements and seating places, while the least preferred (M = 2.96, S.D. = 0.89) scenes comprise a large amount of hardscape. Students had a different preference for landscaping of open study area and leisure time place where the studying area should be designed with vertical natural elements. Shading trees and benches were also highlighted as very important furniture for these places. In terms of spatial organization, the content analysis revealed that these areas should be open and spacious. Places for leisure time need to be decorated with informal landscape design for creating a pleasant view. Designing a landscape with various forms will make these places more pleasant. Scenes of curved paths and colourful plants for these places showed a positive association with student socialization activities.

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To accommodate the current energy system with the renewable energy source, the concept of micro grid (MG) has been developed. Using such systems, different advantage such as minimization of power loss, operating cost, and emission can be achieved. In this paper, the 24-hour power and heat based MG scheduling is investigated under environmental aspects and economic issues as bi-objective modelling in the presence of demand response (DR) program for decreasing greenhouse gas emission and system operation cost. The investigation of the MG contains energy storage system, boiler and combined heat and power (CHP). For solving the problem, first the Pareto optimal solutions have been obtained by the weighted-sum technique, then the fuzzy satisfying approach has been used to get optimal trade-off result. To confirm the performance of the method, the problem is solved in two-case to demonstrate the effects of DR on MG scheduling.