Spaces between buildings: comfort and user-behaviour assessment of outdoor restorative and transition spaces

Designing spaces between buildings and streets as spaces have emerged as a key consideration in city urban planning and design. Cities like Melbourne, Australia have experienced urban revitalisation through the transformation of its street precincts, laneways, arcades, promenades and micro open spaces. A feature in the design of these urban outdoor spaces is microclimate. The evaluation of urban microclimates by means of comfort sensation and physiological temperature generally quantify the effects of urban environments with the use of thermal environmental indices. However, these outdoor comfort indices are underpinned by steady state models primarily developed for indoor applications and have been modified for outdoor use to account for outdoor effects such as solar radiation. This paper is a proof of concept study via continuous monitoring of microclimate conditions and usage patterns of an urban outdoor space located at an inner city university campus. Preliminary analysis of results of the pilot study show observations of the usage patterns of the university outdoor space pointing to a pronounced relationship between the thermal sense of people using the space and the environmental elements of thermal radiation, convection, and contact thermal conductivity not considered by the widely used outdoor thermal comfort indices.