Winter is coming - Investigating urban design in a Winter city

Sammanfattning: All around the world is the form of the built environment playing a significant role in either enabling or inhibiting outdoor activities. When it comes to winter and Winter cities, it is a challenge how to enable and encourage outdoor activities and soft mobility as the harsh conditions often make it uncomfortable to spend longer periods of time outdoors. A major urban design challenge in Winter cities is the reduction of public space as large amounts of snow take a firm grip on open outdoor spaces. By gaining knowledge about how to design in Winter cities, urban designers can properly work towards achieving or improving outdoor comfort all year round. This thesis's main findings focus on the three issues that are crucial to work with in Winter cities: maximizing solar access, mitigating wind, and managing snow. Using these issues as a stepping stone, a toolbox of Winter city design principles is introduced and explained. By using these principles, urban designers can adapt their projects to the often very harsh and challenging climate in Winter cities. To work with locally adapted climate principles is not only a question of creating comfortable outdoor climates and attractive places for people. It is also about supporting and enabling people’s rights to the city during all parts of the year. If failing to do so, there is a risk of people spending a large part of their lives indoors, which affects people’s overall well-being and the social and economical activity in our cities. Kiruna is used as a testbed on which the Winter city design principles are applied. To propose a locally contextual project, the city of Kiruna and the project site is analyzed in detail. The thesis aims to present one version of what urban design in a Winter city could look like.