Relinquishing Ground Floor In Future Cities To The Public
- In all modern cities, every planner knows the ground floor is not a load bearing structure. It is merely there for people to walk off the streets and into offices. But it is also the greatest source of congestion in a city. All the traffic jams and lack of access for people can be put down to city buildings taking up all of the available ground floor space when it doesn't need to.
- The correct solution is to leave all ground floors as empty open spaces for pedestrians and traffic to flow through the building, and have grand escalators to lifts to ferry people from the ground floor to all the other floors. The first two floors or more above ground level should be reserved for shops and storage companies. That way goods can be brought to the local area and stored in bulk. Retailers get to occupy the first two floors or more to sell goods and run services such as restaurants. There should be security so that access to all the other residential and office floors are controlled. Residents should have their own lifts and passes that only allow access to their own floors.
- This kind of building practice is not uncommon and very closely resembles some office block builds in China.
- As the future arrives, and spaces become restrictive, the mixing of offices, shops and residential spaces in large and expansive tower block constructions should be made compulsory. It should not be possible in the future to build residential blocks where there are also no office spaces and retail spaces. It is senseless policy to try to separate residential towers from businesses and retail because all it will encourage people to do is generate huge volumes of people traffic on the move from the tower blocks to shopping areas and back again.
- As technology advances, so too does building technology. It is not a challenge to design spaces in a computer and turn the designs into patterns for cutting steel and mold making diagrams, to excavate and pour concrete and make huge structures. All of this weight rests on deep pillars sunk into the ground. The ground floor does not contribute anything to this process. If anything, removing the ground floor lightens the load on the foundations and what can be put underground such as storage silos and parking.
- The pillars that pass the weight of the building needs to be protected for security reasons. Those area can be clad in water jackets and sand jackets and made with angled surfaces to deflect away any forces that might reach it such as rivers bursting its banks, explosions, mud flows and so on.
- There isn't any need for parking places above ground. It can be set into the floors below ground. If the tower block generates demands from people with desires to come and live in them along with their personal transport, then they are going to bring their trailers, cars, motor bikes etc and spaces need to be provided. It used to be the plan to exclude most people and their real needs from tall tower block construction. But with modern architectural software and a change of priority to integrate everyone and their belongings it would make a step change in how cities are planned.
- As we continue racing towards the Technological Singularity, technology becomes more powerful, and people will have more things to do recreation wise. The better way to spend that time is strolling freely down streets that are not congested and filled with greenery.
