With a massive increase in the urban population in recent years, the demand for new housing typologies is getting high, and as a consequence, open spaces are getting narrow, and cities are expanding, which is causing a significant increase in the urban heat island effect, and to mitigate its adverse effects vegetation plays a vital role as it provides a cooling effect by shading and evapotranspiration. However, wind flow is altered by vegetation and new housing configurations; therefore, wind patterns are becoming highly complex. As wind flow is one of the critical sustainability parameters and significantly impacts other sustainability parameters like natural ventilation, air quality, energy consumption, and pedestrian comfort, it is very crucial for urban planners and architects to analyze the wind flow in the early design stages. This manuscript-based thesis examined the impact of urban typologies with vegetation on the wind flow in the months of summer through the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis and proposed sustainable typologies and vegetation configurations that urban planners and architects can consider to enhance Pedestrian Wind Comfort (PWC) in Munich. Manuscript #1 compared CFD plugins (Butterfly and Eddy3D) for their accuracy, computational efficiency, and capability of simulating vegetation’s impact. For this purpose, distinct urban typologies were analyzed, and the simulated wind results were compared for Butterfly and Eddy3D. Both Butterfly and Eddy3D demonstrated excellent capabilities in modeling the impact of typologies without vegetation. However, due to the constraint of simulating the impact of typologies with vegetation and very high computational times for Butterfly, Eddy3D was found to be a more suitable CFD plugin to use in the early design stages as it reduced the simulation times by 85% as compared to Butterfly. Furthermore, Eddy3D was successfully validated against the field measurements taken at Rundfunkplatz, Munich, which added a layer of credibility to its use in the early design stages by urban planners. Manuscript #2 utilized Eddy3D to analyze the impact of vegetation on PWC in three distinct typologies in the summer season in Munich, Germany, and proposed sustainable urban typologies and vegetation configurations that urban planners and architects can consider in the early design stages. For this purpose, typologies were analyzed for different vegetation configuration scenarios, and simulated results were critically analyzed. It was found that the low urban density has uniform and comfy wind speeds throughout the study area, enhancing wind comfort at the pedestrian level. Furthermore, the leeward vegetation placement against the prevailing wind direction in all simulated typologies provided minimum resistance to the wind flow in all typologies, maintaining the wind speeds above the minimum wind comfort threshold. We concluded that Eddy3D is best suited to model the combined impact of vegetation and urban typologies in the early design stages due to its accuracy and fast simulations. Furthermore, we concluded that the leeward vegetation configuration against the prevailing wind direction enhances PWC in the summer months in Munich, Germany.     «

With a massive increase in the urban population in recent years, the demand for new housing typologies is getting high, and as a consequence, open spaces are getting narrow, and cities are expanding, which is causing a significant increase in the urban heat island effect, and to mitigate its adverse effects vegetation plays a vital role as it provides a cooling effect by shading and evapotranspiration. However, wind flow is altered by vegetation and new housing configurations; therefore, wind p...     »