Bio-Architecture Formosana co-founder and chief architect Ching Hwa Chang has never forgotten the story of “Mother Wang”.

Back in 2012, as a design architect for the Youth Park public housing project in Taipei, Chang was charged with trying to persuade local residents to agree to the project. However, at every public hearing, Mother Wang, a local resident, invariably showed up to protest. “My home overlooks Youth Park and the Tamsui River. The government cannot block my million-dollar views!”

Having never forgotten that experience, when drawing up her design Chang deliberately split the 273 residences into two buildings, situated diagonally across from the riverside. This allowed the breeze to flow through, and afforded river views and good air flow to the rear building.

In approaching the design of numerous subsequent community housing projects, Chang has remained true to her commitment to nearby residents.

“The city belongs to everybody, and everyone has the right to enjoy the breeze, the sunlight, and the views,” she asserts.

Architect Ching Hwa Chang has designed numerous public housing developments in Taiwan. Chang is very alert to community air circulation in defense of residents’ “breeze rights.”

For instance, the four buildings that comprise the Jiankang public housing development in Taipei are arranged in two rows along a narrow 330-meter long plot of land. Low in the center, it acts like a window to the community to the rear. The first floor is raised to allow the southerly wind to funnel between the atrium area and towers. The front of the base is also set back 3.6 meters to allow the breeze from the nearby Keelung River to penetrate the Songshan District via Jiankang Road.

“Ample breeze can help save energy,” explains Chang. Electricity is currently inexpensive in Taiwan, but if one day electricity rates should increase, and if the wind were cut off by the first row of luxury housing along the river, how would the neighborhoods to the rear manage?

When air circulation is good, air conditioners are used for shorter periods, saving electricity costs and cooling off a feverish city.

One day in 2018, a new record high temperature of 38.5 degrees Celsius was reached, so sweltering that only air conditioning made it bearable. Yet wind is a city’s natural air conditioning, and every 0.5 meter/second increase in wind speed lowers nighttime temperature by one degree, resulting in a six-percent decrease in peak period power consumption.

This is especially true in the case of the wind on summer nights. As buildings absorb heat during the day, they need the evening breeze to shed heat. If radiation is poor, the starting temperature the next day is higher, necessitating stronger air conditioning and causing a vicious cycle.

Invisible ‘Breeze Rights’

However, urban planning rarely gives consideration to wind, and can even result in blocking the wind.

Tzu-ping Lin, distinguished professor of architecture at National Cheng Kung University, installed over 100 temperature sensors in Taipei, New Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung, transmitting the latest data every half hour to provide a picture of the urban heat island effect across Taiwan’s major cities. Without exception, every densely built urban area is a mass of red, at least three degrees higher than vacant areas. This amounts to an average of over NT$6,000 higher summer electricity costs.

One day in May, we accompanied Lin as he lugged a wind gauge to Tainan’s largest public housing development, Changrong New City, where over 20 14-story buildings stand arrayed in a line.

At the front of the community, where a southerly breeze blows, the wind gauge indicated a wind speed of four meters per second. The trees that line the sidewalk across from the gaps between buildings lean to one side from years of buffeting by the wind here, but on the other side the leaves on the trees and grass around the single-family houses seem frozen in place, and the rumble of air conditioning units is the only sound.

“When the wind is blocked, it finds its own path. But it still causes a windless area where there should have been wind.” Next, Lin takes us to Tainan’s new hotel district.

lthough there is a large lawn in the middle, the Tayih Landis Hotel, Hotel Cozzi, and Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department store nearby block off the canal breeze funneling along Yonghua Road. The grassy area to the rear is unbearably stuffy, while the wind cutting through the front is so strong that ladies need to hold down their skirts to pass through.

However, moving along Yonghua Road to Shuipingwen Park by the canal, the houses are just three or four stories tall, the same height as the trees. And here, the wind is back!

“Every plot of land has the right to enjoy the wind, along with the obligation to transmit the wind,” Lin stresses. 

Even Cooling Must Incorporate Fairness and Justice

Lin often tells municipal and county governments around Taiwan the story of how the German city of Freiburg instituted “wind justice”.

Situated in the Rhine River Valley, closely flanked by the Black Forest on one side, Freiburg counts on a lazy breeze across the city during the summer months to take away the heat of the day. However, Schwarzwald-Stadion, home to local German Federal League club SC Freiburg, is situated on a wind alley. Fortunately, the stadium’s stands are not tall enough to block the wind.

Still, the bleachers have been expanded multiple times over the years. Both experts and the public expressed fears over wind blockage, and after several protests further expansion was tabled in favor of building a new stadium on the western edge of the city. Construction is slated to be completed this summer.

Rivers, greenery, roads, and low-lying buildings are all a city’s potential natural and man-made wind corridors. When a wind corridor’s land is public, visionary architects are able to implement public service; if they fall into private hands, that is not the case - the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung’s New Civic Center, the Tamsui riverside area in New Taipei, and Taipei’s Da-An Forest Park, all located on prime real estate adjoining rivers and green areas, are all surrounded by luxury residences standing dozens of stories high.

As buildings on the first row along parks and rivers fetch the highest prices, developers with the rights to such luxury residential projects often seek to use transferable development rights to maximize the number of units in the first row. This creates a barrier effect, where breezes from parks and riversides reach just 200 meters into the city and are blocked, therefore losing their radiative function.

“This touches upon wide-ranging interests, requiring local government action,” stresses Lin.

New Taipei City: First to Legislate the Wind

This takes legal tools.

On Lin’s urban heat island map, the New Taipei City districts of Luzhou, Sanchong, and Banqiao are all swaths of red, even hotter than Taipei City. In spite of their close proximity to the Dahan and Xindian rivers, three-quarters of New Taipei’s residents are squeezed in here, and riverside breezes are trapped by the concrete jungle, unable to take the heat away.

The planning of Taipei City featured roads in a checkerboard pattern during the Japanese period, forming a natural wind corridor; yet New Taipei lacked planning, and low-lying illegal corrugated aluminum houses occupied the riverside areas. With development, it fell into the hands of construction companies.

Standing atop Huazhong Bridge looking towards New Taipei City, the old development zone stands to the left, where buildings stand shoulder to shoulder starting nearly right at the river, like a concrete screen; turning toward the new development zone on the right bank, although tall buildings have gradually overtaken green spaces, the buildings are spaced farther apart.

The distinct contrast between the densely packed buildings on the left bank and sparser arrangement of high-end residential buildings on the right bank of the river on either end of New Taipei’s Huazhong Bridge is an outgrowth of varying legal regulations.

The crucial change took place in 2010, when Taipei County was upgraded to New Taipei City (a municipality under direct central government budgeting and jurisdiction), which raised environmental protection standards. 

Han-yun Tseng, New Taipei City section chief for urban planning, relates that the urban heat island effect had already become an issue in Banqiao by that time, and “if further regulations had not been applied to new development zones, the river banks could have been completely blanketed by another row.”

New Taipei City made great strides so that legal codes can stay apace with climate change. In 2013, an 80-hectare swath of riverside land to the north of Jiangcui in Banqiao became New Taipei’s first “wind environment control zone”, where any developments in the zone must conform with the following three principles: Where a building plot exceeds 15 meters in width, the width of the front facing of each building may not exceed 70 percent of the facing; the diagonal length of the building may not exceed 50 meters; vertical setback from riverside roads must be at least four meters.

This restriction implies that buildings must become taller and thinner, and one story can not likely house more than four units. This not only raises the difficulty of designing for architects and increases construction costs for builders, it also complicates local government inspection processes.

Despite this, New Taipei City upped the ante. The following year, in addition to width restrictions in the Bali region along the Tamsui River, New Taipei’s biggest wind entry point, new codes went into place restricting building height to no greater than the spine of Guanyin Mountain, so as to prevent the views and cool breezes from becoming private property.

Mere wind induction is not enough, more greening is also necessary.

In line with annual overall urban planning assessments, the urban planning zones of Fuzhou in Banqiao and the north side of Luzhou have stipulated that large public green belts must be concentrated along shorelines to ensure that the riverside breeze entering the city passes through a large green area first; at the same time, it is recommended that buildings located in the back row have terraced exteriors to direct the breeze downward to circulate into the community’s streets and alleyways.

Taichung: First to incentivize wind corridors

This April, the city of Taichung also revised the Taichung City Urban Renewal Building Area Ratio Incentive Guidelines, becoming the first city in Taiwan to use building area ratio to encourage builders to incorporate airflow channels.

Wen-pin Huang, director of the Taichung Urban Development Bureau, asked Tzu-ping Lin to propose a calculation method - in addition to mandating that the distance between building foundations and vacant spaces can be no less than six meters, he came up with an “air circulation rate” formula using building foundation volume and wind resistance: Development projects with air circulation rates between 15 and 20 percent get a three percent building bulk reward; those higher than 30 percent are permitted a four percent reward.

If background wind speed is three meters per second, a foundation with an air circulation rate of 20 percent has an effective wind speed of 1.41 meters per second. In a stuffy urban environment, this is equivalent to the amount of wind sufficient to move a sheet of toilet paper, enough to make people more comfortable.

If the developer is willing to set a building back from potential air circulation zones facing a plaza or green area, it can gain an additional one percent building floor reward, up to a maximum of five percent.

Still, Lin admits that these measures can only restrict new development projects, and will not likely have an effect on already saturated old city districts. Accordingly, he identified eight additional potential wind corridors running north to south through Taichung, including Willow Creek and Park Lane; for the areas marked off as low-wind areas within 300 meters of a wind corridor, he recommends that the Urban Development Bureau restrict the height and width of new buildings. 

“When wind corridors are mapped out, the government can get to work and make changes,” asserts Lin.

Tainan, Taipei: land reallocation experiments outside cities

More and more cities are aware of the importance of wind corridors. And even when buildings already crowd the cities, they experiment with land reallocation zones.

For instance, the Shalun Smart Green Energy Science City in Tainan mandated that select bases must allot for designing in eco corner plazas to match seasonal wind direction, and link them to wind corridors at least 20 meters wide.

Lin reminds us that every city must draw up its own wind chart, and run simulations using this data before embarking on large-scale building projects. If there is no wind, then it must be induced, or the force of law used to create wind. “Right now the horse is almost out of the barn, but it’s not too late to do something!”

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Translated by David Toman
Edited by TC Lin
Uploaded by Judy Lu