Radiative Exchanges in the Dense City

A central question for urban sustainability is how to build cities that minimize, at the same time, the use of land and energy consumption. Future cities should be as dense as possible to meet the first requirement. However, the energy performance of dense urban areas is still under debate due to the lack of sound arguments. Since the origins of urbanism in the XIXth century, urban planners have incorporated energy considerations into their designs in a qualitative way. Nowadays, the discipline of Urban Physics is a well-established field able to provide them also with quantitative energy information to aid decision-making. This chapter explores how the current energy simulation capabilities, particularly the Finite Elements Methods, can contribute to a systemic study of energy exchanges in dense urban environments. We focus on radiative energy exchanges, which are especially challenging in dense urban morphologies. Finally, we discuss how the feedback between urban thermography and simulations can improve our understanding of the thermal behaviour of real urban environments.