A Review and Insights for Eleven Years of Urban Microclimate Research Towards a New Egyptian ERA of Low Carbon, Comfortable and Energy-Efficient Housing Typologies

Abstract

Since the mid-1970s, urban development in Egypt has sprawled far from the distinguished compact arid built environment, as the court-yarded housing typologies that completed the vernacular picture of desert architecture have been discarded in the early 20th century. This has motivated urban microclimate research in Egypt. The main objective was initially to improve outdoor thermal comfort. Therefore, Egyptian research started with assessing different existing patterns for the sake of climate responsive and sustainable urban design practice characterized with low carbon, thermal comfort and energy efficiency in such a hot arid conditions. That is why the review workflow of this article has followed a design progress workflow that led to solving design complexities with regard to generating housing urban forms on a microclimate basis rather than an article regular review workflow in order to extract the research gaps and conclude insights. After discussing a general framework for generating housing sustainable design identified from the concluded gaps, the main conclusion is a vision and a call to integrate the Urban microclimate-Building passiveness-Renewables design dimensions, UBR, towards the evolution of a new era of energy efficient housing typologies and a 5th generation of Egyptian sustainable cities where the 1st generation of new Egyptian cities started 1970s.

Solar Irradiance Reduction Using Optimized Green Infrastructure in Arid Hot Regions: A Case Study in El-Nozha District, Cairo, Egypt

“…The results showed good agreement between measured parameters and ENVI-met simulation outputs, regarding air temperature and humidity, as with [32,37]; however, the insignificant calculation of the wind speed parameter was considered unreliable. This finding is similar to that of Elwy et al [19], and could be attributed to the non-windy site conditions and the atypical extreme heatwave on the measuring day. Therefore, we used 24 h forced entry into the ENVI-met boundary conditions from the output exported from Meteonorm.…”

“…Contrast is added when distinct colors are present in a space. Trees have other benefits; for example, they replace carbon gas emissions with oxygen, purify the air, shield from noise, and provide security and privacy, especially in private and semi-public spaces [19]. They also increase the land value with respect to the real-estate market [20].…”

The Use of Green Design Strategies for Achieving Thermal Comfort (Applying PMV as a Measurement Tool)

“…In many research studies, ENVI-met has proven its success in performing thermal simulations for outdoor areas. (M. Fahmy, Mahmoud, Elwy, & Mahmoud, 2020;Gehl Jan, 1996;Yang et al, 2011;Yilmaz, Mutlu, & Yilmaz, 2018;Nasrollahi, Ghosouri, Khodakarami, & Taleghani, 2020).These studies confirmed an agreement between the measured data (from the field measurements or observed data at the local meteorological stations) and simulated air temperatures. Envi-met has the capability to simulate the microclimate of any location all over the world.…”

Towards Nearly-Zero Energy in Heritage Residential Buildings Retrofitting in Hot, Dry Climates

“…Additionally, they pointed out that the applications of solar energy (e.g., photovoltaics (PV) and solar thermal (ST)) can be perfectly integrated with the building envelope components of heritage buildings [10,31]. Other similar studies were carried out in non-heritage buildings in Egypt, in a hot, dry climate, such as the work of Attia et al (2013) and Fahmy et al (2020) [20,32,33]. Fahmy et al focused only on analyzing existing studies concerned with urban microclimate and housing typologies and did not tackle specific strategies of the (RES) application in the Egyptian climate.…”