Winter Cities - Theme Cities: Solutions for Urban Problems - page 274

Chapter 8
Winter Cities

Wayne K﻽D﻽ Davies

Winter is a resource and an asset.
Theme of World Winter Cities Association of Mayors'
Meeting, 1982

8﻽1 Introduction

In the late twentieth century it was recognized that the development of settlements
during the previous hundred years had paid less and less attention to the effects of
local climates, especially extreme ones, upon either urban design, or the way that
these conditions influenced the behaviour of people in these centres. This was in
contrast to the situation throughout history, where the plans, building designs and
construction materials of traditional towns and cities, as well as the technologies
and behaviour of people, were intimately related to the local climate, whether cold,
wet, hot or other extreme conditions. For example, the desire to cool buildings in
areas of summer heat led to shuttered windows to keep out the sun, bungalows with
verandas to catch breezes, or wind towers in ports along the Persian Gulf that fun-
nelled cooling winds into houses. The design-natural conditions relationship can
also be seen in pagoda designs in Japan that allowed lateral and vertical shifts,
making them resilient to all but the largest earthquakes. Even some historic building
regulations, such as the famous Spanish Laws of the Indies in 1573 (Mundigo and
Crouch 1977 ), acknowledged the importance of local climates in its guides to the
construction of towns in their colonies, such as recommending that narrow roads
should be constructed in hot climates to ensure shade, while wider roads were better
in cooler climates to catch the sun.
These climatic adjustments in settlements were particularly obvious in cold
climates, such as increasing the slope of roofs in Alpine areas to reduce snow