The bioclimatic urban planning, a case of study: The railway workshops area in Bozen, Italy

This work develops an analysis and design method to improve the sustainability in urban planning of modern cities. As in most of the important cities across Europe, also in Bozen, city administration decided to transform the old railway workshops area into a new modern quarter near the old city centre and, to pursue this objective, it was announced an international design competition. Operating in these kind of areas can radically change all the climate environment of the city, considering the low buildings density and the nearness to the old city centre, as demonstrated by recent studies. Within this context, this article presents the planning methodology developed to reduce the impact on the climate environment of the city by improving bioclimatic solutions at urban scale. Starting from a climate datasets analysis, it was operated a complete solar and ventilation simulation of the entire city to evaluate opportunities and treads linked to the characteristics of project site. The outputs of the simulations provided a complete dataset about solar and ventilation behavior of the area, considering sun and wind the most influent variables for the micro-climatic environment of this part of the city. In conclusion, crossing these data by each other, it was possible to elaborate a zoning of the project site to identify the better strategies to improve the sustainability in urban planning of the area.