Urban Morphology and Energy Performances: Investigating the Impacts of Urban Openness Factor on Theoretical Energy Demand, Case Study: Isfahan Urban Morphological Types

The serious environmental challenges that the human settlements are faced with, such as climate change, resource crisis, greenhouse gas emissions and water crisis are necessitated changing the perspectives and adopting the adaptive policies of guiding and controlling the human settlements towards responsiveness of the above challenges. Accordingly, the present research aims at investigating the effective aspects of urban form on environmental performances while focusing on urban openness as one of the important general factors of built form. The methodological framework of the research has been founded on the analytical-comparative studies of the impacts of urban form on the theoretical energy demands according to the specific morphological units in the general morphological context of the Isfahan. On this basis, five tissue types (morphological units) have been selected arising from urban morphological approaches and methods as the comparative and analytical basis of the study. The results and findings demonstrate that there is a strong and significant correlation between energy demands and urban openness in general while the two classes of measures in terms of levels of complexity are classified as the analytical basis of the research. Results demonstrate that geometrical and configurational aspects of urban form are in compliance with the climatic conditions in environmental performances studies. Finally, indicating the paradoxical behaviors of heating energy demands in cold seasons and cooling energy demands in hot seasons especially in the case of hot and arid climate conditions in relation with urban morphological characteristics (focusing on urban openness factor) has been considered as the most important achievement of this research.