Passive Cooling Strategies in Contemporary African Architecture: A Systematic Review of Thermal Comfort Outcomes

Africa faces increasing thermal stress from rising temperatures, rapid urbanisation, and energy poverty, making it hard to provide indoor environments that are both comfortable and sustainable. Among the range of cooling solutions, passive cooling strategies using natural ventilation, shading devices, and materials with high thermal inertia are considered urban-scale interventions, all low-energy approaches that align with bioclimatic design

principles and allow for the incorporation of local knowledge. In this systematic review, the researcher seeks to bring together previous work on the thermal comfort outcomes of passive cooling strategies in contemporary architecture and to identify performance patterns that depend on context. Following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, we selected ten post-2018 studies from databases including Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and African Journals Online, along with grey literature and regional climate reports. The data was extracted according to strategy type, building typology, climate zone, thermal metrics (PMV, PPD, adaptive hours), and energy impact. The findings show that the application of multiple strategies together always produced better results than that of the single-strategy approaches, with a reduction in the indoor temperatures of 3-5°C and the cooling energy demand of 20-60%. The effectiveness highly depended on the climate, with cross-ventilation and shading being the best in hot-humid areas and high thermal mass being the most important in arid regions. The application of historical and vernacular designs increased the adaptability, especially when combined with modern innovations such as reflective coatings and PV shading. The analysis reveals a persistent gap between the designer's expectations and the users' comfort, thus highlighting an urgent requirement for standard evaluation and climate-based guidelines. Generally, the application of climate-responsive PCS can cause thermal comfort to be better, energy consumption to be less, and African urban resilience to be more durable.

Adaptive comfort, passive cooling strategies, thermal comfort, vernacular architecture

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