Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Sustainable Cities and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/scs Morphological and climate balance: Proposal for a method to analyze neighborhood urban forms by way of densification Martina Pacifici a, ⁎ , Karin Regina de Castro Marins a , Vinicius de Mello Catto a , Fabrizio Rama b , Quentin Lamour a a School of Engineering of the University of São Paulo, Department of Construction Engineering, Prof. Almeida Prado Avenue, Alley 02, No. 83, 05508070, São Paulo, SP, Brazil b School of Engineering of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Department of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering, Campus Reitor João David Ferreira Lima, s/n, Trindade, 88040-900, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Urban morphology Urban climate Assessment method Compact cities Built and open spaces Neighborhood scale ABSTRACT The major cities in the world have adopted certain strategies for people densification to optimize transport costs, to multiply exchanges of goods, to maximize social networking, as well as to promote economic growth. The implementation of such compact cities has profoundly affected the livability of public spaces and the comfort of pedestrians so far. In order to assess the environmental sustainability of this process, a method of analysis is proposed and applied at a local scale. Combining a morphological and climate site assessment, the method is addressed to urban areas affected by a process of built densification or relevant changes. A case study was performed in São Paulo, in an urban area of 100 ha. Inside this domain, different climatic and morphological environments were selected to perform a more detailed comparative analysis of the samples chosen. Climate variability was observed in various points of the domain, despite their very close distances. Three climate zones were identified and morphologically described. The results showed an effective correlation between the spatial arrangement of urban cross-sections and the related climate conditions at the neighborhood level; as a con- sequence, they could contribute to facing the issue of Compact City Design, improving its environmental per- formance. 1. Introduction Cities are hybrid spaces, in which the natural environment blends with the built form produced by man. The complex interaction of these two components discerns an urban settlement from another, providing a new form of “anthropic diversity”. The way in which built spaces are organized and fit into the original geographical context is critical. According to Soleymanpour, Parsaee, and Banaei (2015), people’s comfort and satisfaction depend on the accommodation of built pro- ducts within the local microclimate; a significant distance divides the modern and the traditional city; while the first one increasingly worsens the climate context, the second one was able to enrich it. The industrial revolution is a significant step that universally brands the transition from small urban centers to great modern cities (Marx, 1967 apud Harvey, 2005). Since then, new patterns of urban growth have emerged; they diverge from the historical urban fabric and modify the spatial proportionality between built forms. Consequently, the an- cient spatial arrangements, resilient and capable of favoring good microclimate benefits, disappear from the modern fabric, replaced by a monotone design that disregards the original environmental context. Along this process, the “dichotomy of human and natural systems” increases (Barau, Maconachie, Ludin, & Abdulhamid, 2014) and the urban development is transformed “in an accumulation of disconnected and fragmented regions” in which mega-objects remain “detached from any urban fluidity” (Suau, Bugarič, & Fikfak, 2015). According to Harvey (2005), capital accumulation permanently transforms the an- thropic and natural environment, resulting in morphological changes, causing continuous expansion of the traditional historic centers and creating the emergence of “new spatial structures” (Harvey, 2005). Examples of urban spatial structures, currently emerging in some cities throughout the world, have resulted from the implementation of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) strategies, that intend to “reduce automobile use and promote the use of public transit and human- powered transportation modes through high density, mixed use, en- vironmentally-friendly development within areas of walking distance from transit centers” (Sung & Oh, 2011). Many American and European http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2017.07.023 Received 22 August 2016; Received in revised form 26 June 2017; Accepted 30 July 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: martinapacifici@usp.br (M. Pacifici), karin.marins@poli.usp.br (K.R.d.C. Marins), vinicius.catto.96@gmail.com (V.d.M. Catto), fabriziorama@hotmail.com (F. Rama), quentin.lamour@usp.br (Q. Lamour). Sustainable Cities and Society 35 (2017) 145–156 Available online 05 August 2017 2210-6707/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK