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Traditionally, in Palestine, outdoor spaces played a crucial role in organizing and improving the living quality of the living units, while this important role in modern housing design is lost by a stark separation between internal and private external spaces (balconies, verandas and yards). This separation is disconnecting private inside and outside spaces whereas in the traditional courtyard houses there was a continuity between the inside and the outside. This paper investigates the socio-environmental criteria and characteristics of private outdoor spaces that could play an improving role in the living quality of future housing design. So, a comparative study between contemporary and traditional outdoor spaces characteristics was carried out in two different cities in two different climatic zones of Palestine. The contemporary housing was evaluated by conducting a survey over 300 dwellings of different housing typologies (detached houses/apartment flats), while the characteristics of traditional design were analyzed from the old historical part of these cities. The results of this paper demonstrate that the private outdoor space is a major contributor to enhance housing sustainability. It presents the distinctive qualities of courtyard concept, which ought to be reintroduced consciously into the design of future housing in order to improve the living quality. The paper also identifies the most important factors that ensure those qualities and forms the basis for further research.

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Cities on the east Mediterranean coast, especially in Palestine, are struggling to move towards sustainability as they are vulnerable to climate change and lack natural resources, especially energy resources, and this situation is further aggravated by high energy prices. The problem is the building sector, which is the most challenging sector when it comes to cities’ sustainability and, specifically, energy sustainability. In Palestine, this sector is the main consumer of energy but it lacks energy efficiency measures, such as up-to-date building energy codes. This study analyzed building thermal performance under different scenarios with a focus on building envelopes. We aimed to evaluate the benefits of introducing an updated building energy code—mainly addressing U-values for building envelopes—on future reductions in energy demand. We used a simulation tool (DesignBuilder) to evaluate typical existing building-envelope thermal and energy performances. Then, we undertook a comparison between the existing conditions and the proposed application of different scenarios, including the existing Palestinian building energy code and green building guidelines, the ASHRAE code for building envelopes, and the Jordanian building energy code, in order to introduce an updated building envelope energy code. The results showed that the current situation—building without applying any energy code or applying the existing Palestinian building energy code—is far from the high-energy performance that could be achieved by applying international or local green building codes. The use of thermal insulation could reduce the energy demand for heating by 83 to 43%, depending on the building type, climatic zone, and U-value. We recommend utilizing different U-values for building envelopes in different climatic zones to achieve high thermal performance. The results from this study have implications for construction industry professionals, local governments, and researchers seeking to establish high-energy-performance building envelopes.

Improving the overall performance of residential buildings means exploring and understanding users’ needs, expectations and aspirations, as these greatly affect human comfort, health and well-being. This paper investigates thermal comfort conditions, based on quantitative measurements of typical residential multi-story apartment buildings in Palestine, and a qualitative survey of inhabitants’ satisfaction with the indoor environment of their apartments. From these data, average perceived comfort indices (APCI) were calculated. The survey shows that inhabitants of each building have different comfort conditions, especially in summer, according to the orientation of the space. Sunshine, air exchange and temperature are perceived as the most influential parameters for apartment comfort. Although the APCI shows a good level of comfort globally, most inhabitants very often feel hot in summer, mainly during the day, and cold in winter, mainly at night. Measurements confirm that inside air temperature always remains below 16°C in winter, below the comfort level. In summer, it remains between 25 and 32°C, outside the comfort zone. The perceived comfort level seems more related to the inhabitants’ feeling of powerlessness than to real thermal conditions.