URBAN REHAB

Mediating The Urban Landscape With The Thermal Comfort Of Pedestrians

Traffic islands are unshaded, transitory spaces where people want to spend as little time as possible, due to poor thermal comfort during the day. Usually made of concrete and surrounded by asphalt, the surfaces have high emissivity, therefore absorbing a lot of the sun’s energy in the daytime and releasing it as heat throughout the day. With ground temperatures reaching up to 44 degrees in the day, long waits can be nothing short of biological torture. Thus, the project aimed to redesign traffic islands to prioritise pedestrian thermal comfort.

In the course of our research, we came across a junction which was well-used and thermally comfortable because of the shade and evapotranspiration of trees. There are many benefirts to a tree, it improve both air and water quality by absorbing intercepting particulates, releasing oxygen, reducing ozone levels, and reducing soil erosion; plus, they increase the biodiversity of the space by providing a habitat to secondary organisms such as birds, ferns, and orchids. Best of all, trees do not need much space to grow so long as there is sun, water, and some soil!

Ultimately, after researching widely, we realised that trees is the perfect solution in the long term. The only issue is that trees take time to grow. Therefore, the project’s intervention is to provide an intermediate solution that emulates some of a tree’s ability to provide thermal comfort, with a rapidly deployable, unobtrusive, and safe to use form. Once the tree has grown, the intermediate solution can be removed and shifted to a new location to spur on the rehabilitation of a new island. In time, the island will become a space that people actively choose to go to, a net benefit for the local environment and pedestrians.