Assessing wind comfort in urban planning

There are increasing concerns regarding the quality of urban public spaces. Wind is one
important environmental factor that influences pedestrians’ comfort and safety. In modern
cities, there are more and more high constructions and complex forms which can involve
significant problems of wind discomfort around these buildings. Today, architects and town
planners need guidelines and simple design tools to take account of wind in their projects.
This paper addresses the progress made towards computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
simulations for assessing wind comfort in urban planning. We validated Fluent software for
wind studies in urban environments by comparing our simulations results with wind tunnel
tests. This validation shows that wind mean velocities around buildings can be simulated
numerically with a very high degree of accuracy. Based on the results of a great number of
CFD simulations, we developed a methodology and simple graphical tools to quantify critical
wind speeds around buildings. This article should thus help in practice architects and town
planners to design our built environment. Moreover, this paper shows how numerical
modeling is now a high-performance tool to work out useful guidelines and simple design
tools for urban planners.