The built environment contributes significantly to the rapidly growing world energy expenditure. Due to
urbanization, buildings will continue to contribute to these escalating trends because of their tighter spatial
interrelationships, and the influence of their surrounding micro-environment with respect to their orientations and
designs. The concept of the Inter-Building Effect (IBE) was introduced to understand such complex mutual impact
within spatially proximal buildings. As an extension and a more nuanced analysis of the IBE, our research sought to
disaggregate and quantify the influence of mutual shading and mutual reflection within a network of buildings. A
procedure to separately assess the complex interactions that make up the IBE was developed by comparative
simulation and analysis in a dynamic simulation environment. We built an urban building network model and
conducted cross-regional analysis under different climatological contexts by examining mutual shading only and
mutual reflection only, respectively. We found the shading effect played a more significant role in terms of impact on
energy consumption. This resulted in substantial variations for the control building’s energy consumption when the
shading effect was disaggregated from the IBE. The results of the simulations in varying climatological contexts also
revealed consistent trends of greater impact on the IBE for shading and reflection in warmer climatic cities. These
findings expand and deepen our understanding of the IBE and may help in the search to minimize mutual influences
between buildings that lead to increases in energy consumption in urban environments.