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A. Mahdavi:
"The ill-tempered urban environment";
Keynote Lecture: 30th International PLEA Conference - Sustainable Habitat for developing Societies - Choosing the way forward, Ahmedabad (invited); 2014-12-16 - 2014-12-18; in: "Proceedings of the 30th International PLEA Conference - Sustainable Habitat for developing Societies - Choosing the way forward", PLEA (ed.); (2014), Paper ID Keynote No 3, 22 pages.

To call cities complex entities would be a major understatement. A multitude of environmental, economical, and social disciplines, approaches and studies have only started to scratch the surface of intricate life and evolution of structures we call cities. In this context, the present keynote adress focuses on the challenging and consequential topic of the urban microclimate. In recent history, cities have grown in number and size, emerging this as massive anthropogenic interventions in the planetary environment. They contribute to climate change and are affected by it. The urban microclimate with its temporal and spatial variance can sifnificantly influence the performance of building and the well-being of the city dwellers. In light of this, there is a critical need for a deeper understanding of the tightly intertwined feedback loops between the local, regional, and global climate and their consequences for urbanism and architecture.

no german abstract - see english version