Building Cooler Cities: Advanced Simulation as the Foundation for Climate-Resilient Modular Public Space Design

Cities worldwide face profound morphological changes due to population growth and urban densification. Coupled with climate change, this exacerbates the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and degrades outdoor thermal comfort. This paper introduces a novel simulation framework for climate-resilient urban design, transitioning from static planning standards to dynamic performance optimization. This research utilizes a multi-tiered data acquisition strategy, beginning with a PRISMA-guided Systematic Literature Review of 133 articles to identify key UHI mitigation variables. A high-fidelity, multi-physics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model was developed using the ANSYS Fluent solver, discretized with a poly-hexacore mesh of over 78 million cells. The simulation environment integrates multiscale data, including 2.5D urban geometry from GIS platforms, high-resolution satellite information (e.g., Copernicus and LiDAR) for surface and soil properties, and EUMETSAT weather files for boundary conditions. The model explicitly resolves aerodynamic and thermodynamic exchanges using Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) equations, with vegetation represented via porous-medium parameterization. The core novelty lies in the development of a parameterized library of “Architectural Elements” (AEs) that introduces standardized material properties, derived from Ansys Granta Selector, directly with GIS-based street designs. This allows for iterative “what-if” scenario analyses over critical 24 h periods to assess the synergistic impact of green infrastructure (GI) and advanced materials. Validation against real-world monitoring data from the Grow-Green project confirmed the model’s accuracy, with a maximum error of only 0.22%. The results demonstrate that interconnecting isolated green areas and utilizing local porous materials can reduce UHI spot temperatures by 2–4 °C while significantly lowering building energy consumption.