A Data-Driven and Simulation Approach for Understanding Thermal Performance of Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai, India

Abstract

Over 54% of the world's population reside in informal settlements like slums. Thus, any meaningful strategy for transitioning the world toward a more sustainable urban built environment must address the redevelopment of slum communities. This study aims to take a first-step towards the design optimization of slum redevelopment by evaluating the thermal performance of various urban slum redevelopment morphologies in Mumbai, India. We propose a data-driven and simulation based approach to understand how slum redevelopment morphologies impact thermal performance and validate our approach using real data collected from a field site in the Dharavi slum, Mumbai, India. Results indicate that the existing horizontal form outperforms proposed vertical redevelopment forms in terms of maintaining lower operating temperatures. In other words, vertical redevelopment could worsen thermal comfort conditions for existing residents. Given the current push towards vertical housing structures by the Indian government, our results have substantial implications for the design and redevelopment of such informal settlements and lays the groundwork for establishing design guidelines and processes that ensure more sustainable and inclusive redevelopment.

Natural ventilation versus air pollution: assessing the impact of outdoor pollution on natural ventilation potential in informal settlements in India

“…In this section, we describe the methodology used to study the effects of outdoor PM2.5 on NV potential for major cities in India (figure 1). We utilize and pre-process highly granular 10-minute interval publicly We modeled a typical validated residential building representative of informal settlements in India used in previous studies [47,48] in EnergyPlus [49,50]. We note that we only model the current horizontal form of informal settlements, specified as M1 in the previous studies [47,48].…”

“…We utilize and pre-process highly granular 10-minute interval publicly We modeled a typical validated residential building representative of informal settlements in India used in previous studies [47,48] in EnergyPlus [49,50]. We note that we only model the current horizontal form of informal settlements, specified as M1 in the previous studies [47,48]. M2 and M3 are the complete redevelopment scenarios for informal settlements proposed by the authors in [47] and [48].…”

“…We note that we only model the current horizontal form of informal settlements, specified as M1 in the previous studies [47,48]. M2 and M3 are the complete redevelopment scenarios for informal settlements proposed by the authors in [47] and [48]. Even though M1 is characterized by deep, narrow alleys representative of poor ventilation, we intended to study the impact of air pollution on the current scenario of informal settlements, here M1, to understand and quantify the harmful effects of air pollution on the existing vulnerable dwellers of informal settlements.…”

“…In this study, we used a validated residential model for informal settlements as developed by authors in [47,48]. The model had a horizontal morphology as depicted by the Building Model in figure 1.…”

The impact of light distribution and furniture layout on meeting light exposure objectives in an office - a simulation case study

“…And with the demand for active cooling (e.g., air conditioning) expected to sharply increase in tropical countries [Mastrucci et al, 2019], these well-intentioned redevelopment efforts may result in increased energy poverty and urban building energy consumption. We use a validated informal settlement model for Dharavi, Mumbai, India [Debnath et al, 2016;Nutkiewicz et al, 2018] to evaluate the embodied and operational energy requirements to provide sufficient thermal comfort under various design decision scenarios. In doing so, we quantify the life cycle energy implications of informal settlement redevelopment and highlight the need to consider thermal comfort in its proposed plans.…”