‘Urban Ventilation Assessment and Wind Corridor Plan for Chinese Cities’

Fast urbanisation in China has deteriorated urban environment conditions, which can be featured by weak urban ventilation, poor air quality and reduced urban visibility. As sustainable urban development has become more widely recognised in China over the last decade, decision-makers and planners have requested scientific-based evidence to support their urban planning and design. 

Professor Ren and her team have conducted a series of cross-disciplinary collaborative research revealing how to evaluate urban ventilation for planning purposes and develop the wind corridor plan in urban design and planning exercises since 2006. This is the first study to investigate and quantify the effects of major planning and development proposals on urban ventilation in the world. Based on remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) techniques, it developed scientific protocols to assess potential wind dynamics and detect wind corridors. Its scientific evidence and findings were used to optimise design flexibility, building height relaxation, better building disposition and urban morphology control at multi-scale levels. 

The developed method and techniques have been implemented into master city plans, urban designs and wind corridor plans of over 40 Chinese cities and also adopted into the development of local urban design guidelines, technical notes and legal documents, including China’s national technical guide ‘Specifications for climatic feasibility demonstration – Urban Ventilation Corridor’. This national guide has been endorsed by the Ministry of Natural Resources of China and implemented into the city master planning exercises in all Chinese cities since 2019. It has helped address the call of the territory development control plan, construction of ecological recovery and civilisation, environmental pollution control and also the response to climate change at the city scale.

At the international level, the research has led to several practical research and government consulting projects in cities across Asia and Europe and influenced city planning exercises and climate change adaptation policies. The research findings were noted in Chapter 10: Asia, in Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and three guides issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Professor Ren and Professor Li received the University’s Knowledge Exchange Excellence Award 2023 for this project.