It is a complex and comprehensive topic to reach comfort conditions, and all possible factors must be kept at an optimum level to achieve it. Comfort in urban open spaces is one of the main bases of the use of these areas by citizens and creating a suitable environment for them through protecting against inappropriate climatic conditions seems essential. Thermal comfort is the comfort desired in this study. Thermal comfort is one of the essential factors that should be considered in the process of urban open space design.Urban open spaces should have comfort conditions including thermal comfort to improve quality otherwise they will turn into dead spaces. Accordingly, in line with creating the desired space, one of the most significant aspects is designing open spaces in cities and residential neighborhoods to provide citizens with comfort, and also paying attention to the quality of these spaces. The quality of the urban open spaces use depends on multiple factors that among these factors thermal comfort is particularly important among them. A public space that cannot provide comfort for users would be used less and even avoided. Therefore, according to the importance of providing thermal comfort in open spaces of urban and neighborhood, the purpose of this study is to analyze the thermal comfort conditions of residential open spaces in Isfahan by using three standard effective thermal temperature indicators, physiological equivalent temperature, predicted mean vote of winter and summer seasons, and unfold their performance and thermal behavior. In this paper, four neighborhoods of Ali Gholi Agha, Jolfa, Mardavij, and Dashtestan in Isfahan have been studied and analyzed. The research method used in this article is case study in which field surveys and evaluation of environmental and personal variables of four selected neighborhoods have been done. In this research, the variables were obtained using measurement, computing, and questionnaires. The sample size also included residents and users of public open spaces in selected neighborhoods that one hundred questionnaires used to survey 100 individuals in each field based on the Nichol method. Therefore, in this study, eighty hundred residents and users of neighborhoods were selected as sample size. Eight hundred questionnaires were randomly filled out in four neighborhoods of Ali Gholi Agha, Jolfa, Mardavij, and Dashtestan located in Isfahan city in two hot and cold seasons. In this regard, the respondents were 52.37% male and 47.63% female, and their average age was 33.5 years. Also, in this study, the RayMan model version 1.2 was used as computational software to calculate the indices.
This software uses climate data, personal information, activity, clothing, and information like latitude and longitude, height above sea level, cloudiness level, etc. to calculate selected attributes, and then the results are compared with the existing standards. Then, to validate the data and compare the thermal indices with the results of field surveys, neutral temperature and average thermal sensation of users are also obtained. Finally, the validation results of standard effective temperature indicators, physiological equivalent temperature, and predicted mean vote of open space in Isfahan neighborhoods showed that field perceptions differ from the results of the index calculation in some cases, and it does not match with the real situation. In this way, RayMan's computational program, without considering factors such as thermal sensation and psychological factors such as behavioral adjustment, expectations, thermal experiences, duration of presence, mental perception and so on, can be one of the reasons for the discrepancies of the indices computation results with field observations. The results also showed that the three indices of standard effective temperature, physiological equivalent temperature, and predicted mean vote were independent of each other; the behavioral independence of their data is also evident in the thermal condition results of the selected neighborhoods. Totally, according to the analysis of outdoor thermal comfort conditions of residential neighborhoods using thermal indicators, it was found that the thermal comfort status of the studied neighborhoods open spaces was not very favorable in both hot and cold seasons; but by validating and comparing them with the results of field studies, their conditions changed, and all the neighborhoods except Mardavij are in the comfort zone in the warm season. Finally, the thermal comfort conditions of the selected neighborhoods based on the above indices were presented in two hot and cold seasons, and validity indicators were introduced to evaluate thermal comfort in Isfahan open spaces.