Climate Responsive Planning Framework for Hangzhou, a Hot-Summer and Cold-Winter City of China

The characters of outdoor radiation and wind environments that favor building energy efficiency in winter opposite those in summer. This study developed a planning framework to create ideal outdoor climate for urban buildings under such contradiction, so-called the climate responsive planning. A hot-summer and cold-winter city of China, Hangzhou, was selected as the study area. First, the typical urban blocks were collected based on urban space sampling and clustering analysis processes. Then, the solar radiation and wind pressure distributions on the surfaces of 112 typical buildings within 60 urban blocks in both January and July were simulated. The climate-responsive performance of typical buildings were evaluated based on the simulation results. We found that the natural ventilation potential in summer is most important for improving the climate responsive performance of buildings in Hangzhou (with the weight of 0.60). And a sparse rather than condensed building layout is beneficial. As a suggestion, the building density of urban blocks should be reduced by 4% when the floor area ratio increased by 1.0. The framework proposed in this study contributes to developing concise and effective planning principles in the urban renewal process, especially for the cities with similar climatic characters.