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Significant changes in the urban built environment have occurred due to rapid urbanization and increases in the urban population. Such alterations may produce environmental health-related issues such as urban heat stress, air pollution and traffic noise. This research undertook a field study to collect data including urban design parameters, micro-environmental factors and city climatic information. This work was conducted over a two-year period on three pedestrian streets located in high-density urban areas in Beijing. These areas were selected in order to study the influences of urban street canyon texture within a particular geometric layout, wind flow corridors and variations in air temperature on pedestrian microclimatic comfort. The results will facilitate the work of urban planners by providing them with information for use in improving outdoor thermal comfort through their designs. A total of 60[Formula: see text]485 samples were organized into training, validation and test sets. We confirmed our hypothesis that internal wind speed ([Formula: see text] is attributable mainly to the urban texture coefficient ([Formula: see text], air temperature ([Formula: see text] and leading-in wind speed ([Formula: see text]. The model was tested using the test data collected onsite, which demonstrated a very accurate goodness-of-fit; the model achieved an R-squared value of 0.82, which meant that [Formula: see text] as a dependent variable was 82% correlated to the three predictors as independent variables. With this computer simulation, urban planners can now predict and visualize the impact of changes on the built environment in terms of either the direction of solar radiation received or increases in wind speed, in return for the desired thermal comfort level for residents of the neighborhood.

The interaction between urban building layout and urban external wind resources has determined the characteristics of the internal wind environment in urban built environment so as to have certain influence on the urban heat island effect, building energy consumption, the thermal comfort inside and outside the building, the air quality and the health of the residents have a certain influence. This study attempts to understand the correlations between urban design elements and wind environment. The method is to use field tests of physical environmental indicators to obtain the microenvironmental wind speed under the pedestrian scale in three selected pedestrian streets in Beijing: Wangfujing, Beijing, Qianmen Street Dashilan and the wind direction and wind speed data outside the city have also been has collected. The urban design elements including street width, landscape design, pavement materials, and others are analyzed in terms of the impacts on wind environment. KEYWORDSHigh-density districts; urban wind environment scale of pedestrian; data collection and analysis.

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