Silvia Tavares

The consequences of climate change will inevitably contribute to the pressures applied to urban spaces. Urban greenery plays a vital role in urban heat alleviation, providing multifaceted benefits for public spaces. With limited space available for urban greenery, it is crucial to understand how to arrange vegetation to maximize cooling benefits and minimize the extreme effects of climate change. This chapter presents the role of urban greenery in reducing urban heat, and the influence of spatial allocation of urban vegetation on heat reduction. The strategy for arranging urban greenery to alleviate heat stress is outlined. Based on the findings, this chapter also discusses potential research directions aimed at better protecting vulnerable groups experiencing the impacts of climate change in urban public areas.

This work critically reflects on the necessity for different understanding of the contemporary urban challenges prevalent in the urban design and planning discourse. We seek to canvas a divergent pathway to embrace complexity and in doing so advance and actualise an urban design and planning paradigm shift. We reject the piecemeal and reactive practices that follow the predict and provide for the market rhetoric while envisioning the critical role of higher education within our discipline. This essay is a call for a collective realisation that we need to mainstream different ways to overcome the prevailing dissonance between intent and outcome. To enable conditions for a new ontology of practice and pedagogy of understanding in which holistic policy making and design of new urban spaces benefits all. Our BASC Lab serves as a living case study to illustrate the possibilities for approaching complex societal issues by responding to the complexities of cities and their escalating environmental, sociological, and technological entanglements, and addressing impacts on people and place now and into the future. Reflections are presented on the role of higher education to achieve an intergenerational paradigm shift where justice is served in praise of a larger ecological and regenerative systems approach to the urban condition. Here we outline collaborative efforts on bioclimatic urbanism through climate-responsiveness for all, while impacting as little as possible on the natural environment. The understanding of sociotechnical urbanism reflects on complex systems thinking for holistic decision-making and the prioritisation of health and wellbeing for just cities beyond the human domain. We conclude with an open-ended call to realise the role of our discipline and higher education sector where deeper learning, research and advocacy meet. Let us rediscover the beauty of a complex, non-linear and relational ecological awareness embedded within our professional ontology.

While indoors microclimates are readily controllable by air conditioning, urban outdoor microclimates are often accepted as public open spaces with innate characteristics. There are, however, psychological factors and cultural expectations that influence microclimate experience in open spaces (Lenzholzer 2015). As public open spaces are essentially congregational social spaces, social activity and accessibility influence adaptation to the thermal conditions of the urban environment. The challenge, therefore, is to identify the place-based and local sociocultural values that shape the use of public urban microclimates. Based upon the theory that physical and social landscapes co-constitute urban microclimates, this chapter approaches people's response to outdoor microclimates as a product of regional context. Thus, I consider the landscape to be one of the variables integrated into regional identities and responses to climate. The general adaptive capacity concept refers to the ability of systems and people to cope with external stress factors (Denevan 1983). Adaptive capacity is used here as the capacity of humans to adjust to the existing thermal environment, even if the local conditions are outside of the scientifically-defined comfort zone (Olgyay 1963) . In addition to the physiological perceptions, microclimates are embedded in socio-cultural practices and meanings.

The built environment is a territory of intellectual achievements. It is imprecise and variable, dependent on technology and social skills. The concept of sustainability, as used to qualify the environment and actions, establishes a relationship between space and production, connecting factors related to financial costs and profit, material and immaterial. Architecture also relates to ideas, but it is based upon the process of designing spatial and temporal order, and it materialises itself through constructing places for human activity, being subject to the application of appropriate techniques. This is the reasoning for a convergent discourse, which relates built spaces and their interaction with living things – vegetal and animal. This chapter discusses the built environment as a territory for life, sustainability as a direction, and architecture as the art combining built environment and construction. The objective is, therefore, to delineate common points on the definition of architecture, sustainability, and built environment, in a contemporary context. More specifically, to define a possible universe for these concepts to be used in architectural design education. It is suggested that concepts of bioclimatic architecture is a direction for an intelligent design, which qualifies architecture as art, adapted do the local environment while promoting sustainability.