8747765961

Abstract

The climatic adeąuacy of urban spaces is an important parameter for city planning and human thermal comfort purposes, particularly in tropical context, where most of urban activities can be developed outdoors. Thus, the present work aims to evaluate the influence of different urban configurations in pedestrians thermal comfort at Maceió, a tropical city of Northeast Brazil. Measurement points located in two distinct ąuarters in the studied city had been chosen and microclimatic measurements of air and globe temperaturę, wind speed, relative humidity and simultaneous application of questionnaires to the pedestrians were conducted. Similarly, the thermal sensation was compared with the actual thermal sensation obtained from calculations and existing indexes in the technical literaturę. The results show that the characteristics of the urban spaces, as the presence of vegetation and the use of constructive devices to promote shadow, among others, influence the values of climatic variables and also the feeling of comfort or discomfort to users. For the cases studied, we highlight the influence of shading by vegetation canopies and at the points considered morę comfortable. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt the external environment to fit the spaces outside the urban reality tropical climate, as well as researches that discuss the existing thermal indices that need adjustments in order to translate the thermal sensation of users in the tropics.

Key-words: urban spaces, human thermal comfort, urban microclimates.