Ground floors are front facade of cities

Cities need to design for people and appropriate scale to accommodate residents, by considering the speed of our movement, how we move, how our senses are geared when walking, and how we see things. We see everything horizontally but we see very little up and a little bit more down. We can see when we communicate with people, if it's intimate relationship, we communicate at a close distance. We lean over for more private conversation and it would be very personal. Commonly, when we have to communicate with public, the social distance becomes further apart. We have a number of distances when communicating which are part of our instincts and upbringing.

Gehl stated that people have the same body anatomy worldwide. If we are waiting for a bus, we will all the time stand with arm's length between them until the bus comes because that's part of the body, that's part of the body regardless of any weather conditions. Cities where people feel really comfortable are cities where they design to accommodate human scale not the cities design to accommodate cars.

When designing a city for social sustainability, integration of human scale in design process is crucial. Because it will dictate how people experience their cities. Most important part of buildings is the ground floor where people experience the city at eye level. Ground floors are crucial for the experience and attractiveness of the urban space, in both residential and commercial areas. Safe, clean, relaxed and easily understood ground space can attract visitors and support social and economic sustainability of the city. Good ground floor are main contributors of the urban economy, and not only because of consumer spending but also balanced labour market with enough people with a higher education demands a functional urban environment for living, shopping and playing. The knowledge and experience economy requires spaces with character, a good atmosphere, a place for people to meet and to interact. The entire urban environment shapes this atmosphere, but ground levels play a key role. The ground floor may be only 10% of a building, but it determines 90% of the building’s contribution towards the experience of the urban environment.

Ground floor restaurant at Barangaroo, Sydney

Source- http://outlaw-urbanist.com/blog/2015/04/09/the-human-scale/

Image Source- http://www.lendlease.com/expertise/what-we-do/urban-regeneration/

Comments

Start the fight

Most people don’t realize that food waste goes beyond the moral implications, wasting food when one billion people go to bed hungry every night and it is also a major environmental problem. It is so sad that we have the power to feed the hungry with all of the food we waste and yet we just throw it into the garbage. Food production is also the largest single driver of biodiversity loss and creates at least 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to wasting labor and resources, as food decomposes in landfills it produces methane, a greenhouse gas. Food waste is occur in the field, in storage, in transport, and at home. Everyone including farmers, food manufacturers, and consumers are responsible for food waste footprints. Despite what many consumers think, expiry dates are unregulated and do not indicate food safety. One of the best ways to tell if food has gone bad is not by using some fancy technology, but by simply putting our senses to w...

Living smaller and closer

As population density increase, the distance between people and their destinations decrease. Can reduces energy use, carbon emission, and waste in all sectors of city. The most important factor is automobile use, which is bad for the environment not only because they directly consume fuel and emit pollutants but because they facilitate the creation of far greater sources of energy and environmental damage. Automobile usage also encourage sprawling communities, over sized dwellings, inefficient commerce, and huge networks of redundant urban infrastructure. Density allows people walk from place to place due to proximity of services. Dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible templates for addressing one of the world’s most discouraging environmental illness, climate change. We need to find ways to reduce the size of our living spaces, and decrease the distance between ourselves and our destinations, and begin to step ourselves away from our near total dependence on automobil...

Less is more

Necessities and well-made special things that bring us happiness are great, but needless stuff are wasteful to produce, package and ship and once we start drowning in our stuff we either suffer from the stress of it or we end up send it packing to the landfill, where it may endure for many lifetimes. And while swapping and sharing and donating may postpone stuff's trip to landfill site, it still weighs heavy on the planet. Our obsession with owning needless things becomes nightmare to our planet. It’s time for us to start practicing minimalism and enjoy the beauty of simple living. We can take a stand and maximize the principles of minimalism to counter attack with less to discover how little we actually need to be happier, more content, and less stressed in life and also contribute towards sustainability by consuming less. Minimalism is just keeping things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from it to improve in almost all aspects of our life. The...

SUSD0001

Search This Blog