A performance analysis for squares in terms of thermal comfort criteria and usage-users relations

A square is an open public space that bears witness to significant incidents in settlement throughout the history, and gives identity both physically and socially. It is however observed at the present time that use public space has changed due to gradually increasing population, change of user trends and presence of approaches that fail to observe thermal comfort and locality when making decisions that relate to open space plan and design. Using alternative spaces such as malls as well as virtual socialization spaces equipped with new technological opportunities are rather preferred. In this context, providing thermal comfort at open spaces appears to be a field of study that needs to be discussed, involving comprehensive environmental conditions. Once natural, spatial and social parameters are successfully examined and designed, open spaces will benefit from natural resources optimally, hence spatial quality will have been improved. It is therefore crucial for thermal comfort and environmental quality, consequently for users' health and convenience that urban squares are in harmony with spatial, social and climatic characteristics of the town. In this study, meteorological, geographical and spatial characteristics of urban squares, as well as individual and sociological features of open public space users have been scrutinized with a view to determining design parameters that would help the integration of urban squares with the design processes. For this study, urban squares of five different cities with different climatic zones in Turkey have been examined for their ecological design and thermal comfort criteria; hence their energy performance has been evaluated. Eligible urban squares in a city have been determined based on preferability of location-based data by users via Phyton programming language, and accordingly ten urban squares among historical and modern squares have been selected from five different climatic zones. Thus selected urban squares have been studied in terms of conformity with their climatic zones and designated thermal performance parameters; they have been compared to other squares in terms of thermal characteristics, urban morphology and design parameters. Recommended method is not merely limited to spatial parameters as it is capable of evaluating the correlation between daily and seasonal cycles introduced by changing climatic and design characteristics of sample areas with the frequency of use. In this context, data sources that enable dynamic analysis of square characteristics and useruse correlation, and help to manage the same through technological opportunities have been utilized. For sample areas, ArcGIS and ENVI-met software suites have been used for coevaluating spatial data such as climate, altitude, windward, precipitation, temperature, density of structuring, land use, with data such as plan, model and simulation. So, conformity of fields of study with the territory is examined as far as thermal comfort is concerned. Density of use in urban squares and users' demand data are analyzed for urban square use performance by way of integration of software- extracted user data from big data sets at open sharing media, with ArcGIS, thus specialization of data.