Urban microclimates cannot be explained solely on the basis of scientific phenomena, but are also affected materially and spatially by the city’s local architecture. The layout, design, and facade construction of buildings have a major impact on wind and temperature conditions. For this reason, architecture and urban design that have an effect on microclimates must be investigated in their social and cultural contexts. The publication uses international case studies to explain these relationships. The focus is on manifestations of urban microclimates in an architectural and urban design context. The places investigated are located in France, Italy, the USA, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Burkina Faso.

In the past decades, protecting the urban environment in the face of environmentalism and environmental rights has become crucial to saving the planet from the dangers of the rapid urban development of new cities and societies. Air temperature is one of the factors influenced by climate change and contemporary city morphology that lacks compact city features. Contemporary cities have taken on global paradigms, adopting open-fabric, multiple, and ultrahigh residential towers and superhuman-scale spaces at the level of squares and public parks. This type of planning results in a radical thermal transformation not only in the movement and transportation network, but also in all public spaces and their external spaces. It is essential to understand the dimensions and principles of urban planning and design in conjunction with the competence of environmental design to reduce the impact of the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon. Remapping Urban Heat Island Atlases in Regenerative Cities focuses on public health and wellbeing, decent work and economic growth, sustainable cities and societies, and climate action. It presents atlases of UHI-based digital techniques and methods of modelling as well as the use of these atlases, mapping, and models in exploring the placemaking problems in the new cities. Covering topics such as artificial intelligence, pedestrian density mapping, and urban heat island mitigation, this premier reference source is a critical resource for architects, city planners, urban planners, city officials, government officials, policymakers, non-profit organizations, politicians, engineers, libraries, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

The quality of life of millions of people living in cities could be improved if the form of the city were to evolve in a manner appropriate to its climatic context. Climatically responsive urban design is vital to any notion of sustainability: it enables individual buildings to make use of renewable energy sources for passive heating and cooling, it enhances pedestrian comfort and activity in outdoor spaces, and it may even encourage city dwellers to moderate their dependence on private vehicles. Urban Microclimate bridges the gap between climatology research and applied urban design. It provides architects and urban design professionals with an understanding of how the structure of the built environment at all scales affects microclimatic conditions in the space between buildings, and analyzes the interaction between microclimate and each of the elements of the urban landscape. In the first two sections of the book, the extensive body of work on this subject by climatologists and geographers is presented in the language of architecture and planning professionals. The third section follows each step in the design process, and in part four a critical analysis of selected case study projects provides a demonstration of the complexity of applied urban design. Practitioners will find in this book a useful guide to consult, as they address these key environmental issues in their own work.

The publication rethinks climate control – a key concern of the discipline of architecture – through the lens of city climate phenomena over the course of the 20th century. Based on a history of climate control on urban scales, it promotes the integration of indoors and outdoors in order to reduce environmental and thermal loads in cities. Just as heating and cooling practices inside the buildings are affecting the (urban) climate outdoors, urban heat islands are influencing the energy requirements and thermal conditions inside the buildings. While the first part of the book focuses on the interwar period in Europe, the publication’s second part considers examples from all over the globe, tracing the growing significance of ecological thinking for the design of urban environments.

Informality through Sustainability explores the phenomenon of informality within urban settlements and aims to unravel the subtle links between informal settlements and sustainability. Penetrating its global profile and considering urban informality through an understanding of local implications, the authors collectively reveal specific correlations between sites and their local inhabitants. The book opposes simplistic calls to legalise informal settlements or to view them as ‘problems’ to be solved. It comes at a time when common notions of ‘informality’ are being increasingly challenged. In 25 chapters, the book presents contributions from well-known scholars and practitioners whose theoretical or practical work addresses informality and sustainability at various levels, from city planning and urban design to public space and architectural education. Whilst previous studies on informal settlements have mainly focused on cases in developing countries, approaching the topic through social, cultural and material dimensions, the book explores the concept across a range of contexts, including former Communist countries and those in the so-called Global North. Contributions also explore understandings of informality at various scalar levels – region, precinct, neighbourhood and individual building. Thus, this work helps reposition informality as a relational concept at various scales of urbanisation. This book will be of great benefit to planners, architects, researchers and policymakers interested in the interplay between informality and sustainability.

While 20th century architecture learned to control the climate of a building, the architecture of the 21st century needs to learn to cope with the climate of cities. Problems such as urban heat and air pollution need to be included in planning and design. Based on empirical realities in Cairo, Chongqing, Geneva and Santiago de Chile, the book underlines that the materiality and social practices attached to room heating, compound greening, street alignment or climate policies together form the tissue for contemporary urban climates. It interweaves socio-cultural with meteorological data and pioneers the new concept of "thermal governance" by linking architectural and technological as well as legal and economic dimensions of climate control in urban environments.

This conference proceeding LNCS 12203 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design, CCD 2020, held as part of HCI International 2020 in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the corona pandemic. The total of 1439 papers and 238 posters included in the 40 HCII 2020 proceedings volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 6326 submissions. The regular papers of DAPI 2020, Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions, presented in this volume were organized in topical sections named: Design Approaches, Methods and Tools, Smart Cities and Landscapes, Well-being, Learning and Culture in Intelligent Environments and much more.