This year’s Building Simulation and Optimisation, IBPSA-England’s Sixth Conference, and second Virtual BSO was hosted by the University of Bath and the Centre for Energy and the Design of Environments (EDEn). The GEMDev team successfully presented its work titled “Towards a universal access to Urban Building Energy Modelling – The case of low-income, self-constructed houses in informal settlements in Lima, Peru” The abstract can be found below together with a link to the conference proceedings.

“By 2050 urban population is estimated to grow from 4 billion to almost 7 billion, with over 90% expected in the Global South, where development often takes place as unplanned informal settlements, with essential shortage of critical infrastructure. In processing some of the associated rising challenges, Urban Building Energy Models can play a key role. However, such models have had limited presence in this context, highlighting the inequalities in the representation of such communities in this field. This paper works towards addressing this gap and presents the development of an Urban Building Energy Modelling workflow for analysing the thermal comfort in a self-constructed, low-income housing neighbourhood in Lima, Peru, using an innovative approach, based largely on open source software, such as EnergyPlus, QGIS and Python. The results highlight that the compact and dense built form of the building blocks, can cause higher heat retention, especially in lower thermal zones and therefore result in high indoor temperatures for longer. Additionally, the poor thermal performance of the buildings’ fabric, can cause hourly indoor temperatures to rise to critical levels, especially in higher thermal zones, which can have adverse impacts on the residents’ health. This first step in understanding some of the key issues these communities are facing, is critical in the early assessment of future building retrofit decisions.”

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