Pocket parks for human-centered urban climate change resilience. Microclimate field tests and multi-domain comfort analysis through portable sensing techniques and citizens' science

Dense urban areas are subject to dynamic and urgent challenges, exacerbated by anthropogenic forcing. Urban Heat Island and heatwaves pose a threat to citizens’ comfort, due to extreme microclimate conditions. In this panorama, urban parks represent effective strategies towards more livable and comfortable urban areas. In particular, small pocket parks could aid in the mitigation of such challenges in every neighborhood. Indeed, they are in close proximity to citizens, allowing large population groups to benefit from the advantage of living green areas. Therefore, this paper assesses for the first time microclimate conditions and personal multi-domain perception imputable to pocket parks, by means of human-centered experimental analyses, coupling objective and subjective assessment. Wearable monitoring-systems are employed for the assessment of granular-microclimate variables mapping, and questionnaire-surveys are collected in the pocket parks and their surroundings, for comparison purposes. Results show that, while microclimate mitigation is not extremely significant as expected (−0.5 °C air temperature, +5–10% relative humidity inside the park), perceived comfort in pocket parks is higher than on the streets, shifting from “neutral” on the close by streets to “good/very good” in the park. Therefore, a better design for microclimate mitigation of pocket parks is needed, especially taking into account the potential air stagnation, while acknowledging their fundamental societal role.