Climate sensitive planning. Opportunities from the study of local climatic zones, Santiago, mediterranean big city, as a case study

Urban planning, through land use design and allocation, affects urban climate dynamics and patterns at different atmospheric layers and spatial scales. The "Climate sensitive planning and design" draws attention to the consideration of climate parameters in decisions, which means an opportunity for Chile, which since June has a Climate Change Law that requires the definition of local action plans year 2025.

The recognition of the factors that explain the behavior of the climate in the city, such as the densities or construction heights included in the local climate zoning - ZCL (Stewart & Oke, 2012), allows to identify intervention scenarios and direct planning and design guidelines.

Based on the above, models were built to calculate air temperature at the block scale. Twenty-three urban environmental variables were evaluated with summer and winter, day and night temperature data series recorded at 50 points distributed in the city of Santiago, representative of the local climate zones defined by the proposal of Stewart & Oke (2012). In addition, a method for calculating future temperature was considered, integrating the projections generated by the Chilean Climate Risk Atlas and the trends observed in air temperature over the last decades. In all models, surface temperature, relative humidity and vegetation cover were shown to have a statistically significant relationship with temperature. The model also assessed the importance of characteristics of neighbouring blocks, such as building height. The results show significant differences in the distribution of air temperature across the city, with important differences associated with socio-economic inequalities in materiality, building density and vegetation cover between neighbourhoods. Finally, the air temperature of each block also made it possible to calculate the environmental thermal comfort and the potential energy demand for heating and cooling.