This article discusses the retrofitting of public spaces in compact urban areas bearing in mind the need for outdoor thermal comfort. The role of paving materials and vegetation was focused on a field survey undertaken at a square in Porto, Portugal. The potential for microclimatic improvement of different combinations of paving materials and vegetation was explored through simulations with ENVI-met. The options, objectives and results of the simulations and an evaluation of Life Cycle Assessment related factors were addressed and discussed. The best improvement scenario was defined stressing the relevance of ‘cool’ paving materials and vegetation and the need for a sustainability analysis throughout the design practice.
This article addresses the use of photographic comparison as a complementary visual appraisal method in an outdoor thermal perception survey. This survey was carried out during a Ph.D. research exploring how materials and vegetation influence thermal comfort in outdoor public spaces. Objective and subjective thermal perception parameters were combined and quantitative and qualitative research methods were used. The quantitative methods included microclimatic measurements, whilst the qualitative methods comprised observations and spatially localised interviews based on a questionnaire and the photographic comparison. This article explores how such visual research method allowed triangulating findings of this field survey. Three non-edited photographs of outdoor public spaces, under similar summer meteorological conditions but with contrasting spatial features, were shown to respondents to the questionnaire. The photographs depicted undisclosed locations for preventing biased emotional appreciations. Respondents were asked to select the potentially most comfortable and uncomfortable environments depicted. The choice of photographs matched the previous answers on the thermal sensation and evaluation judgement scales. Hence, we discuss the way the visual interpretations by respondents allowed the triangulation of in situ thermal perception data. The extent to which thermal comfort can be interpreted from thermal environments depicted in photographs containing clear visual signs is further discussed. The article concludes on how such a visual appraisal method can be valuable for enriching future qualitative outdoor thermal perception surveys with subjective interpretation of visual data.
The discussion regarding the relation of design and research in landscape architecture started somewhat later than in other design disciplines. But the past decade has shown a sharp rise of publications on 'research through/by design(ing)' (RTD). The literature has now reached a level of richness that enables a review of the State of the Art and a differentiation of types of contributions to the discourse. We reviewed more than 200 publications (scientific journal papers, conference papers, PhD theses, MSc theses and others) on RTD in relation to landscape architecture and closely related disciplines. The review shows that a rather small portion of the publications deals with RTD a scholarly sense. The remaining portion of scholarly publications offered a useful base for further scrutiny. We categorised the relevant literature according to types of publications and the epistemological stances taken. Based on this categorisation we identified areas that need further research and thus sketched an agenda for further research on RTD in landscape architecture.Landscape architecture; research through design; research by design; review
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.