There are increasing concerns regarding the quality of urban public spaces. Wind is oneimportant environmental factor that influences pedestrians’ comfort and safety. In moderncities, there are more and more high constructions and complex forms which can involvesignificant problems of wind discomfort around these buildings. Today, architects and townplanners need guidelines and simple design tools to take account of wind in their projects.This paper addresses the progress made towards computational fluid dynamics (CFD)simulations for assessing wind comfort in urban planning. We validated Fluent software forwind studies in urban environments by comparing our simulations results with wind tunneltests. This validation shows that wind mean velocities around buildings can be simulatednumerically with a very high degree of accuracy. Based on the results of a great number ofCFD simulations, we developed a methodology and simple graphical tools to quantify criticalwind speeds around buildings. This article should thus help in practice architects and townplanners to design our built environment. Moreover, this paper shows how numericalmodeling is now a high-performance tool to work out useful guidelines and simple designtools for urban planners.
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