Superpowered Streetlife: Spectra’s Ground Floor Concept
This post is part of Spectra Cities’ “Ten Stories of Urban Design” series. Explore our Spatial.io spaces for a first-person experience of these stories on mobile, desktop, or headset. Join our Discord to become a member of the Spectra community. Follow along on Twitter for daily updates and events info.
Ground Floors in Cities Today
Have you ever considered how much of our city experience is determined by what’s on (and can be seen from) the ground floor?
If you live in or have lived in a city, take a minute to think about your neighborhood. Or, maybe just think about a city that you visited recently.
Are the city blocks long with mostly apartment building entrances on the ground floor? Or shorter with a mix of storefronts, grocers, and restaurants? The entire block could be a shopping mall with advertisements in the windows. Maybe, you’re downtown, so it is an endless treadmill of corporate office entrances.
Now, think about the crowd. How many people are there? Are they sitting, window shopping, or in a rush to get somewhere? Perhaps this changes throughout the day.
Two Ground Floor Models in Spectra Cities
These are some of the questions we asked ourselves when prototyping the initial designs of blocks and their ground floors in Spectra Cities. We explored ground floor concepts from architectural, social, and economic perspectives. After several rounds of editing, we produced the initial designs for two models. Both can be seen throughout the Source City.
Traditional/Enclosed Ground Floors
The first model provides a traditional shop frontage that follows the line of the city block, where the street façade is the boundary of ownership. This may be similar to what you pondered a second ago.
A key difference compared to many cities today is that Spectra’s blocks are highly mixed use and even have public courtyards on the second floor of buildings. This allows block residents to own and adapt the ground floor for commercial, storage, or even light industrial space.
These types of dense mixed-use spaces have become increasingly rare as suburbanization and sprawl separated residential areas from commercial areas. How many businesses are there in your neighborhood? How many minutes would it take to walk to the nearest grocer?
Open Ground Floors
The second model dissolves the straight boundary in favor of a more permeable condition. Streetscape and ownership boundaries are allowed to wave and bend, while still keeping some of the linear street structure inherited from the upper floors.
The design rationale is for human mobility to be freed from the grid-like linearity of the city and encourage a spatial discovery experience similar to wandering through a forest. City blocks designed like this are also rare. Is there somewhere you have been that comes to mind?
Both models are designed to support dense, mixed use neighborhoods. Blocks with an open ground floor in particular can excel at maximizing public and commercial spaces, while enclosed ground floors can be well-suited to privacy, storage, and light industrial use.
Open Transit and Mobility
The open ground floor concept also allows for alternate transit routes. We imagined a micromobility route called ‘broadway’ that weaves across Spectra’s streets and blocks via the ground floor. While useful as a circuitous route for exercise or leisure, the ability to cut through blocks might also result in quicker journeys.
Along broadway, we imagine service hubs with amenities such as bicycle parking, public seating, and charging stations.
Climate and Community
Assuming a warm climate gave further emphasis to the open ground floor concept as a shaded public area where streetlife could continue to thrive through summer months.
The ground floor is one of the block’s largest amenities and sources of foot traffic, and very similar to the courtyard and rooftop, which residents can adapt to the needs of their community and neighborhood.
Modeling Ground Floors in Virtual Reality
As always, the process of co-designing these ground floors started in VR and will eventually transition to an IRL physical project. The ideas presented here are open to change and VR is our shared planning space for discussion, experimentation, and play.
If you’d like a say in designing the ground floors or any other part of Spectra’s urban environment, consider joining our Discord and attending one of our weekly community events on Spatial.io!
All of the assets in our Source City Toolkit are free to use and share under a Creative Commons license. Files can be downloaded for Rhino, Blender, Unity, and Spatial.
