Rez de Ville: The Urban Ground Floor as a Project for City Design

One of the foundations of the liveable downtown areas is the well-functioning ground floor zone on the border of private and public space. The aim of the study is to get to know the “urban ground floor” and to summarize the domestic and international technical literature of the topic. In addition, the establishment of a multi-scale typology of the characteristics of the ground floor zone on the basis of the contemporary urban planning literature. The analysis provides a historical overview of the urban ground floor from the perspectives of spatial, space use and space management from the Middle Ages to the present. It then groups the existing urban ground floor concepts according to the focus of the approach, based on the domestic and international technical literature. Finally, based on spatial, space use, and space management perspectives it explores the criteria of the human-scale urban ground floor grouped on the scales of the “neighbourhood,” “street,” and “building”. The study explores the diversity of urban ground floor structures. Nevertheless, it highlights that the interpretations of the urban ground floor by thinkers opposed to modern architecture still provide a stable foundation today. Exploring the criteria of spatial theory, space use and space management on the urban ground floor helps to formulate theoretical and practical, complex development responses. The study draws attention to the importance of continuous monitoring of the changes in space usage concerning the ground floor and the use of progressive tools of urban development and space management. It emphasizes the importance of a foresight strategy for the development of the ground floors, based on emerging local needs, existing functions, and, in addition to social and environmental aspects, management and economic aspects leaves scope.

The International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), through the Athens Charter of 1933, strongly advocated the creation of open urban spaces as an essential principle of urban planning, referring to open spaces such as the city’s lungs. It is certainly for this reason that several authors choose the green spaces and urban parks of cities as the fundamental open public spaces to integrate in the design of new cities and in the rehabilitation of the oldest or parts of these. However, in the older cities, namely in their older core cities, or in compact cities the physical limitations, to a certain extent, make the existence and creation of this type of urban public space unfeasible. Above all, in these cases, the increase in the attractiveness of the public space should focus on the morphology of buildings, particularly on the ground floor, as it is also defended by several authors. In this context, this paper is dedicated to the definition of a new concept of building - network building (of generalized application to isolated buildings or set of buildings), whose conceptual characteristics have taken into account criteria of polyvalence, flexibility, adaptability, durability, sustainability, permeability and aggregation of functions. The role played by these buildings establishes connections and promotes pedestrian mobility, the interconnection of places of conviviality or daily use of the public space. These buildings also contribute to the diversity of activities of work, leisure, culture and housing, generating vitality of the environment and qualification of the urban areas where they are inserted. In addition to the definition of the new concept, an empirical assessment based on the adaptation of the correspondence analysis to the discriminant analysis is made to classify, in relative terms, 37 buildings of the city of Lisbon of the last 70 years.

“A city is more than buildings and streets” – says the description. How to shape a city, if not with buildings and streets, indeed? More specifically: with the wall and the floor they run along. What is the architecture of urban ground floors? Where does it set the boundary between private and public? What relations does it make? As much as windows are generally studied by i.a. Window Research Institute, ground floors require detailed academic work. This text discusses typology of selected cases, driving attention to the importance of ground floors to shaping the city. Not much attention is given to ground floors at the moment, yet they directly accompany residents’ everyday life and affect its quality. Keywords: city, urban interior, public life, architecture

Urban Squares in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: a Street View on Ancient Near Eastern Governance

An extensive urban renewal scheme, Euroméditerranée (EuroMed), has transformed Marseille’s northern industrial harbour through a seven billion euro investment of public and private funds, using robust legal tools to erase and replace the urban fabric over its 480‐hectare area. Since 1994, it has introduced offices, upscale housing, and commercial spaces, promoting new construction to solve Marseille’s perceived social issues: poverty and crime. Operated by the EuroMed Development Agency (EPAEM), it deploys legal instruments similar to an aggressive precedent, the Haussmann-style urbanization of the Rue de la République (1864). In this case, large urban forms and aggregated ownership facilitated sizeable property transfer and large‐scale operations, paving the way for current expropriation and demolition policies towards recapitalization via urbanization. EuroMed’s urbanism yields an architecture of large, monofunctional blocks with blind, sealed, or vacant ground floors. It aims to partially demolish and sanitize the former industrial area and the adjacent small, affordable, diverse urban fabric of urban villages like Les Crottes, Le Canet, and La Cabucelle. The present work builds on ongoing research on the evolving character of the Euroméditerranée project, its actors and forces, and the tools it employs, detecting changes in urban quality with a focus on the pilot block Smartseille (Angélil et al., 2020; Malterre‐Barthes, 2024). In particular, the work articulates a critique of the resulting aspect of the urban ground floors: inactive and unengaged with the surroundings, termed here as ‘mute’. Through a mixed methodology of archival and discourse analysis complemented by extensive fieldwork focused on ground floors, this project seeks to uncover how an architecture generated by past and present real estate economics aided by public force and design hubris impacts the streetscape of Marseille.

The research is framed thematically in the field of urban open space design in the contemporary city, mainly dealing with the system of urban voids. The hypothesis from which the search starts is that it is in the thickness of the ground of the city that architecture, as a spatial configuration, can operate in a more effective and incisive way to the city project. Consequently we also want to investigate the possibility of related project devices. In order to do that, we take São Paulo as the field of enquiry, because the two meanings associated to the expression “the thickness of the ground” are particularly relevant in this city.

The urban ground floor of the typical American city is comparatively privatized, exclusive, and unconducive to diverse local purposes. Proponents of more versatile and inviting urban environments are likely to hear that their proposals face insuperable cultural obstacles. In fact, these obstacles themselves began as contested, heterodox, and farfetched innovations. In the twentieth century, the typical American city street was radically transformed. Novel standards, initially controversial, legitimized and ostensibly necessitated the changes. The new measures were prescriptive, mandating vehicular storage, speed, and throughput over other important urban functions. Valuable street uses that were inconsistent with these criteria were either redefined as nuisances or, more often, omitted from calculations entirely, thereby mismeasuring their value at zero. The effects included privatization of public space and public services, the erosion of proximity and its practical benefits, the neglect of local needs in favour of regional demands, burdensome expenses for those seeking to retain practical mobility, and mobility impairment for the rest. More inclusive measures remain marginalized as heterodox ‘alternatives’, and are therefore often thwarted. Their ultimate success will require demystifying the predominant standards by revealing their contested origins as the original heterodox and farfetched alternatives. Inclusive histories of the authoritative measures of the American street reveal them to be unscientific mismeasures, historically anomalous and therefore unworthy of the authority they still hold.

The formation of the city design code is considered as an objective and global phenomenon that has developed in many developed European countries in recent decades. Being primarily aimed at achieving visual comfort, the design code in the conditions of the post-industrial city acquires a new color, covering the entire subject-spatial environment of the "urban planning ground floor" as a space at the level of the first two floors of the building, equipped with street furniture and a visual communication system. The city design code is studied as an integral element of urban design, which, in turn, determines the features of the urban environment, its components, supports natural and cultural components based on belonging to a certain place. At the same time, the characteristics of a "place" directly depend on its placement in a specific structural element of the city, and the creation of a design code, thus, should be based on a historical-genetic analysis - a kind of evolutionary study - of the city's historical-genetic code. Based on the understanding of the modern city as a complex, open, hierarchically organized system, the concept of forming a design code is proposed as a system forming element of the general system of urban design, which is aimed at overcoming the negative legacy of industrial society and humanizing the urban environment and is projected onto the structural and planning organization of the city in accordance with the genetic code.