An Analyses of the thermal comfort potential of vegetation, in tropical urban outdoors, with special reference to urban streets in Colombo

Abstract

Urbanization is becoming critical in environmental point of view all over the world. An over concentrated populating in space puts a huge weight on the region's overall ecosystem. As big cities grow, the population movement over loads these areas with air pollution, strangled transportation, water shortages, housing shortages and living densities, which go beyond the realm of human reasonable. Therefore temperature of cities is increasing rapidly owing to heat gain through machinery, vehicles and human bodies. Urban environmental changes are occurring in turn affecting the quality of life in urban areas. In some metropolitan centers, the ecology is hazardously close to cracking. By contrast, a population that is spread more evenly over it's region minimizes its impact on ecology of the environment and shows that it can look after it self and the land more prudently, with less wade and more humanity. People are more comfortable when they have access to the countryside, experience of open fields, agriculture, access to wild plants, birds and animals. Hence, by introducing greeneries to these metropolitan centers, comfort could be increased. Urbanization due to its increased thermal capacity, lack of water for evapotranspiration, and the 'canyon effect" tends to aggravate the negative effects of climate. Although the heat islands in the equatorial cities are not extensively researched, the few studies that do exist tend to confirm this view. Emmanuel (1993). Sri Lanka being an equatorial country has a uniform weather pattern. Therefore any change done to make the cities comfortable would be effective throughout the year.