Green facades for a resilient and liveable built environment: A holistic multi-criteria approach for selecting vertical greening systems

Vertical greening systems (VGS), i.e. vegetated building facades, can harness the benefits of nature to contribute to resilient and healthy cities. A lack of guidelines for the early selection and design of VGS currently limits implementation. Based on a literature study and expert interviews, this thesis proposes a multi-criteria framework and...

Evaporative cooling of a bioreceptive concrete facade

The urban heat island effect is a well-known and pressing problem in cities today related to urbanisation. It is the phenomenon of an increased ambient air temperature in cities compared to the surrounding rural areas. The use of nature-based solutions has been proposed as a way to help solve this problem. These interventions use nature and...

Towards a more nature-inclusive and climate resilient built environment: A framework and tool for the economic valuation of the costs and benefits associated with the implementation of vertical greening systems on buildings

The application of vertical greening systems (VGS) onto building envelopes constitutes an innovative way to implement more green in the living environment. Especially in dense urban areas, where only limited space is available to integrate more horizontal greening at ground level, VGS have the potential to contribute towards creating a greener,...

Improving the Acoustic Absorption of Vertical Greening Systems

Noise pollution is a growing health concern in cities, especially in busy streets with parallel reflective facades, known as urban street canyons. Here, high flows of vehicular traffic generate a broadband noise, with high noise levels in the low-frequency (LF) spectrum. In the canyons, noise decays slowly due to multiple reflections. To counter...