Urban gardens: as a solution to energy poverty and urban heat island

Urban gardens are a means of greening and are created by a local community. As regards any urban environment, urban greening helps cooling the air and provides shading, thus reducing building energy consumption and improving the outdoor conditions during the summer. In more detail, vegetation is a way to deal with the phenomenon of energy poverty in which many people cannot meet their basic energy needs as well as the phenomenon of urban heat island. This paper deals with the ways in which vegetation affects the improvement of microclimatic change, mainly through evapotranspiration. This is examined in a region of the city of Chania. More specifically, through the application of Envi-met software the current condition, a scenario with absence of vegetation and two scenarios of different vegetation are analyzed. In the last two scenarios fruit and vegetables and agro-biodiversity like herbs, which both are consumed, are used.