Extreme heat and urban morphology create the urban heat island (UHI) effect, which drives to the increase of temperatures in urban areas. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission has published the report “EU Cities and Heat Extremes”, informing local authorities on steps to address urban heat. For example, integrating and improving green infrastructure, such as green walls and roofs, trees and green surfaces. It is important to note that the influence of these strategies will be directly linked to the climatology of each district or city, making a prior assessment necessary to evaluate the influence of each strategy and thus, prioritize among them. For this, it will not be enough to apply “general equations” for all cities, since it will be necessary to quantify and, based on measurable data and parameters, make decisions.

Within this general context, up to now, the Urban Medium Conditions subject of the San Sebastian School of Architecture (UPV/EHU) has focused on exposing only the theoretical influence of construction and soil materials, vegetation or water in the urban environment. However, an important milestone has been reached in the 2024/25 academic year, where, for the first time, the teaching team has integrated the analysis, simulation and measurement of the thermal behaviour of a neighbourhood through the software ENVIMet.

To develop this objective, during this course 2024/25 the problem-based learning methodology has been implemented, where students work on four projects:
(1) Analysis of the influence of climate characteristics, sunlight and wind influence on the urbanization project;
(2) Analysis of the characteristics of urban plots based on sustainability criteria;
(3) Determination of earthworks and signatures; and
(4) Quantitative analysis by ENVIMet software of microclimatic and analysis of different scenarios.

This fourth project consists of four classes (12 hours total). During the first two days, students model the buildings, streets, soils, trees or humid spaces defined in previous projects, obtaining different results (using indicators such as air speed and air temperature) associated with the thermal behaviour and comfort of this urban space. Based on the results, during the third and fourth day, students propose new scenarios to reduce the UHI effect, simulate these scenarios and discuss their influence on a specific district and climate zone.

One of the main challenges is the coordination between the three groups that make up this subject (Basque, Spanish and English groups), where the number of students exceeds 100. For this reason, cooperation between the teaching staff has been essential. Given the challenge of the exercise and the added difficulty of integrating new software within the subject, the teaching team developed a specific new guide for the use of this software within this subject.

The results obtained have been a great triumph, since, on the one hand, the students have adapted very well to this new project-based work methodology, and, on the other hand, the majority of the students have been able to simulate and obtain the results through ENVIMet.

Based on these results, for future courses, it has been proposed to maintain this project-based methodology and also the use of ENVIMet as a tool that will allow quantifying environmental aspects when designing urbanization projects.

Keywords: ENVIMet software, quantification, problem-based learning (PBL), district thermal simulation.