Effects of cultural diversity and climatic background on outdoor thermal perception in Melbourne city, Australia

Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable is one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). This goal is particularly important in global cities where public places are shared with diverse communities. Successful design of shared, sustainable, and comfortable public places is, therefore, key to an inclusive and resilient urban future. Thermal comfort levels have proven to be a pre-requisite to the success in using public places, given its significant effect on their users' experience. However, in global multicultural cities, providing thermal comfortable public places is challenged by the diversity of their users. This paper aims to identify the effect of cultural diversity and climatic background of urban places' users on both their thermal perceptions and comfort levels. Field measurements were conducted in parallel to structured questionnaire and observations to interlink the empirical micrometeorological data with the subjective human assessments. The field empirical measurements took place during summer and winter along with a total of 2123 valid questionnaires and observations at two selected case study at Melbourne, Australia. Statistically significant variations in thermal sensation votes and thermal adaptation factors were found to be related to the users' cultural and climatic backgrounds. These findings showed the effect of the users’ cultural and climatic background on their thermal sensation votes, and how it is crucial for these parameters to be taken into consideration while designing urban places within multicultural communities