A systematic review of published articles on the analysis of the effect of Climate Change and Urban Form

Over the past few decades, the increasing growth of cities has caused extensive changes in different regions of the world. This trend in industrial cities and metropolises, with the provision of comfort facilities, has led to the expansion of their physical dimensions and has brought various consequences. Changes of initial form of the urban area’s is one of the most important factors of the physical growth of the cities which has a direct impact on the surrounding environment. In the past, mankind has tried to examine, plan and even adapt preventive methods for cases where environmental changes took effect suddenly and in a short period, such as floods and storms, based on historical data and records, the causes and conditions of its occurrence to predict. But only during the last few decades, those changes that have had long term effects, such as climate change, without any objective representation, have been measured and investigated with different methods and found its harmful effects. Mankind has not yet found a special solution for it.

The purpose of this research is to study the orientation of theories focused on the Urban Form and Climate Change, with a descriptive-analytical method and using systematic review’s of data which the output was 39 selected sources out of 705 selected articles from the Scholar Google, Scopus and Web of Science database, determines why and how they are specified and which one is distinguished from the other. Due to the contrast of two variables and the multidisciplinary nature of this research, the issue of urban form has had more weight in opinion raised. Due to a better review, references from 1960 to 2020 were selected and the main keywords were considered without any specific geographical restrictions.

in this research, the urban form has been examined as the physical part of a city, considering all its details and conditions. Studies show that the researches conducted in the filed of the Urban Form have longer history than Climate Change, but these studies are not consistent with the opposition of these two variables and no proper planning has been done in this regard. The findings of the research indicate that in the proposed theories, the physical development of cities has an inverse correlation with the climate, it has become more serious over the past 30 years, and the urban form theories have not been a deterrent factor in changing the physical form of the cities to control climatic conditions. In order to investigate the mutual effect of urban form and climate change, two important points should be considered. First, the basic changes of the city should be examined in specific period that had the most impact, and secondly, the climate change process should be examined in the same time frame. These points help to better analyze what is needed to reduce climate impact.

The most important factors in examining the mutual effects of changing the urban form and climate change include knowing the geographical location, the physical shape, size of cities, the distance between cities, development process and challenges. It is believed that many theories based on urban form could act in a way to propose a preventive plan regarding the climate change challenge. The components of this research have gained importance over the past years with the intensification of climate change effects, but it still has an unknown part of a puzzle that if there is a change in the from of today’s cities, can we imagine better condition for the climate in the future?