The Consideration of Urban Climate in Building Standards and Urban Planning Formulations---a Review in China

Urban climate and urban development are interrelated. Urban development has an evident impact on local and regional climate, while the change of urban climate reacts on urban environment.

In China, with the lack of the effective management and control of urban development, the rapid urbanization and the growth of the number of densely populated cities bring two effects: explosion of energy demand and deterioration of urban environment. Energetic, climatic and environmental issues in the cities need urgently to be paid close attention to.

It has been proved that the effective urban planning, block design, buildings’ layout and equipment’s energy consumption can achieve a significant reduction of co2 emission since the Mid-2000. As architects, urban designers and urban planners, it is imperative to discuss how to ameliorate urban (micro) climate, save building energy use, reduce co2 emission through the way of building design, urban design and urban planning. Therefore, it is crucial to collaborate deeply with urban climatology.

In this paper, it reviews the collaboration among urban climatology, building design, urban design and urban planning from the view of building and urban legislations, their development and faultiness in the recent 10 years in China.

Firstly, it cards the policy documents concerning the national and provincial planning for climate change since Chinese government implemented “China’s National Climate Change Programme” in 2007. The provisions concerning building arrangement and urban planning are extracted for mitigation and adaptation of climate change.

For the analysis of building and urban legislation concerning urban climate, three study scales are proposed: the scale of building and its surrounding environment, the scale of urban block and district, the scale of city. At the scale of building and its surrounding environment, the series of green building standards and the series of building’s energy efficiency standards are listed and studied from the view of energy-saving, emission-reduction and thermal environment amelioration of the building’s surrounding environment. At the scale of urban block and district, the representative legislations such as “Code of urban residential areas planning & design (GB 50180-93(2002)), “Assessment standard of green eco-district (Draft for comments in 2015) ”, “Design standard of thermal environment of urban residential district(JGJ 286-2013)” etc, are discussed from the aspects of buildings form and arrangement, transportation, diversity and landscape, outdoor thermal comfort and local climate. At the scale of city, urban planning formulation at different levels such as urban and town system plan, central zone plan, regulatory plan and site plan are studied for coping with climate change from mitigation, adaptation and extreme climate response. Three case studies on special planning of climate change at the city are compared.

Based on the review of building and urban legislations in the recent 10 years in China, it finds out that the role of urban climate in building and urban legislations has become more and more important, from secondary concern to special discussion subject. However, it is still a long way to advance the collaboration among urban climatology, building design, urban design and urban planning. With the lack of the communication among meteorological bureau/urban climate center and construction committee/ urban planning bureau, the climate factors are not well considered in some of the building and urban legislations. Architects, urban designers, urban planners and policy makers sometimes are lack of the basic climatological knowledge and information. For example, at the building and district scale, the impact of micro and local climate hasn’t been well considered in the evaluation of urban heat island and building’s energy consumption; at the city scale, it lacks the climatic methodologies and tools to predict the impact of the plan on local and regional climate; moreover, some provisions that have considered directly the climatic factors are really hard to implemented in urban design and urban planning.

Finally, this paper proposes how to promote the application of climate science in the building standards and urban planning formulations on the operational level in China.