On the occasion of the 6th IBPC, a Summer School was offered in Turin to PhD students and young researchers working in the areas of Building Physics, Building Systems, Energy Efficiency and Urban Energy Planning. Diana Apró attended the event, focusing on the urban environment and its relationship with building physics.
Urban environments differ from the natural one in a number of respects. These differences are due to the alterations induced by urban morphology and by human activities on natural environment in terms of thermal, chemical, acoustical and visual parameters. One problem of increasing importance is to understand how the alterations of the urban environment can be mitigated, in order to make our cities and districts more comfortable to citizens and building occupants. On the other hand, attention is drawn on buildings in their district and urban context to support urban planning by understanding how buildings or groups of buildings can be arranged, positioned and designed in their territorial context (solar exposure, wind, pollution sources, noise…) to be better tailored to the urban microclimate we can expect to see nowadays in our cities. The Summer School aimed at providing knowledge and tools for investigating these issues and encouraged students to formulate their own problems and find suitable answers in relation to their specific field of research in building physics.
