International audienceSocieties have to both reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and undertake adaptation measures to limit the negative impacts of global warming on the population, the economy and the environment. Examining how best to adapt cities is especially challenging as urban areas will evolve as the climate changes. Thus, examining adaptation strategies for cities requires a strong interdisciplinary approach involving urban planners, architects, meteorologists, building engineers, economists, and social scientists. Here we introduce a systemic modelling approach to the problem.Our four-step methodology consists of: first, defining interdisciplinary scenarios; second, simulating the long-term evolution of cities on the basis of socio-economic and land-use models; third, calculating impacts with physical models (such as TEB), and; finally, calculating the indicators that quantify the effect of different adaptation policies. In the examples presented here, urban planning strategies are shown to have unexpected influence on city expansion in the long term. Moreover, the Urban Heat Island should be taken into account in operational estimations of building energy demands. Citizens’ practices seem to be an efficient lever for reducing energy consumption in buildings.Interdisciplinary systemic modelling appears well suited to the evaluation of several adaptation strategies for a very broad range of topics
The evidence for the influence of urban configuration on outdoor climate conditions, on the energy balance of buildings, and on diffusion of pollutants is quite conclusive. But the exact characterization of this complex link remains critical, especially because of the extreme morphological heterogeneity at a fine granularity level: the building and its close environment. In this approach I try to cope with this difficulty, by working at the district or city scale, by assimilating the urban fabric into a porous medium with a rigid solid skeleton, and by proposing a simple spatial model based on a set of original morphological indicators of environmental performance: density, rugosity, porosity, sinuosity, occlusivity, compacity, contiguity, solar admittance, and mineralization. This system of indicators has been embedded in a shell of development of GIS and applied to various urban fabrics. The possible applications of this model are diverse: simplified analysis of outdoor microclimate tendencies, sustained environmental evaluation of a neighborhood, interdistrict or intercity comparisons, or modelling of the climate effect on future urban amenities.
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