Adapting Indoor Spaces for Outdoor Sports in Hot Climate Environments- A Literature Review

Gulf countries have been working for the past few decades on developing their infrastructures to create world-level cities. In doing so, they have engineered their living conditions to maximize comfort by using controlled environments as a solution for extreme climatic conditions. The outcome of this development is an increase in energy consumption to serve the cooling needs of confined spaces and to allow outdoor activities only at specific times of the year or day. This paper presents a literature review on issues related to the use of cooling confined spaces and the lack of outdoor activity in these countries. Many studies in different fields have shown that the environment in which an activity takes place affects the user's comfort and well-being as much as the activity itself. This paper presents studies showing the relationship between surroundings and activity, making use of architectural data and physiological parameters to understand how to adapt indoor environments to provide comfort to individuals engaged in outdoor sports while also limiting energy consumption.