In cities, the increase of artificial surfaces to the detriment of natural ones deteriorates the environmentl quality.
The VegDUD project, funded by French Research Agency is an interdisciplinary assessment of vegetal technics projected in the future denses city with a focus on climatology, hydrology, energy and ambiances. It aims at increasing the knowledge necessary to orientate urban planners and policy makers. The problem is tackled from complementary angles:
- Practices: What are the traditional and new pratices of urban vegetation? After surveys we focused our research on five families of vegetal devices.
- Instrumentation: Can we qualify environmental impacts of vegetation? What are the best spatial and temporal scales to assess them? How do they combine with urban morphology ?
Urban vegetation representations are implemented in climatology, hydrology, sound propagation and building
energy models form the architectural up to the city scale. To validate them, experimental campaigns are
conducted. Measurement techniques arte developed to understand the physical processes generated by
vegetation.
- Documentation: Can we rapidly acquire a sufficient knowledge of urban vegetation presence at a large scale? We develop a common GIS to integrate the results of field surveeys, propose urban development simulations and render the building-vegetation interactions in the actual and future city.
- Analysis: What will be the long-term impacts of the present policies? What are the possible alternatives?
We compare retrospective and prospective simulations using our models. With these physical assessments, economical constraints, sensible aspects and vegetation pratices wil also be considered.
