Urban Form Compaction and Energy Use Intensity in New Social Housing Neighborhoods in the UAE

Khaled Galal Ahmed and S. M. Hossein Alipour
Additional contact information
Khaled Galal Ahmed: Emirates Center of Energy and Environment Research, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain 15551, UAE
S. M. Hossein Alipour: Architecture Engineering Department, College of Engineering, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain 15551, UAE

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 14, 1-24

Abstract: With increasing global awareness of sustainable development, federal and local authorities in the UAE have developed agendas for energy efficiency in all development sectors, especially for buildings and urban development. With the belief that urban form is integral to urban sustainability, several recently developed single-family social housing neighborhoods in the UAE have shifted from conventional sprawling urban forms to more compact ones. Unfortunately, the impact of this shift on operational and cooling energy use intensities (EUIs) is unknown. Adopting a comparative computational method, this study investigates the effect of compact urban morphologies on EUIs. In addition to a case study representing conventional urban sprawls, six recently designed housing neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Al Ain were selected to represent new compact urban forms. This study uncovered an inconsistent relationship between floor area ratio (FAR) and average housing operational and cooling EUIs. To justify these results, the effects of increased lot coverage area, street grid patterns, building configurations, and climate zone on operational and cooling EUIs were studied, and all except climate zone were proven effective. This study concludes that the current design philosophy of compacting the urban form has not successfully met the Emirates Green Building Council’s (GBC) sustainable operational EUI benchmark of 90 kWh/m 2 /y. While further urban compactness (i.e., increased FARs) is needed, the other urban morphological measures examined in this study should be considered for achieving a more sustainable urban form for social housing.

Keywords: urban form; compact; energy efficiency; energy use Intensity; social housing; neighborhood; UAE (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/14/3815/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/14/3815/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:14:p:3815-:d:247699

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().