Exploring the Three-dimensional Repair of Urban Ground Floor in Meicai Area of Shenzhen: An Approach for Pedestrian System

“Taking the ground floor of the city as a project space” is a concept translated from French “(ré)aménager les rez-de-chaussée de la ville” which means re-amending the city’s ground floor. Ms. Ariella Masboungi, a famous French architect-planner who initiated the concept, emphasized that it has great functional significance in achieving pedestrian-friendly, promoting economic sustainability, and revitalizing the ground floor by the ground floor is taken as a project space in terms of urban projects practice. With three-dimensional development of the city, the ground floor space has turned from a single ground-level to a multi-level three-dimensional system connecting the the space above, on and under the ground. Among them, the pedestrian space is a carrier to connect the above-ground and under-ground space in the multi-level ground floor system, which can interact well with buildings and infrastructures, and has the effect of promoting urban function compound and social integration. However, in reality, the repair of cities’ ground floor in China lacks the backing of project space, in which the pedestrian space faces a particularly serious fragmentation problem. Therefore, this study takes the city’s ground floor as a kind of project space, and focuses on the central part of remediation works, that is pedestrian system, so as to explore an approach to three-dimensional repair of the ground floor of the city. The study selects Meicai Area of Shenzhen as the empirical research object, a high-density environment with the opportunity to build new subway stations, and explores how to stitch different levels of pedestrian space in a three-dimensional way, so as to promote the city to fulfil its functions related to public life at different elevation levels. This study firstly introduces the concept of taking the ground floor as a project space through literature review, and takes the theory of three-dimensional city and the theory related to pedestrian system as the theoretical basis of this study. After that, this study examines the cases of taking the ground floor as a project space, and summarizes the multiple challenges of repairing the pedestrian system: 1) the fracture of pedestrian space and the limited ground space; 2) the lack of pedestrian life and the space’s single function; 3) the coordination of public interest and private property rights. The research design starts with the analysis of the project opportunity for spatial repair in Meicai Area, the spatial analysis of the pedestrian system and the survey and analysis of the public life in the area, and then the study summarize the core problems of the pedestrian system and to assess the necessity of three-dimensional space repair. Then, this study proposes three major schemes for repairing the pedestrian space of the ground floor in Meicai Area: the first is spatial connectivity, vertical connection and connotation expansion, the second is a public-private collaboration strategy; and the third is to use ArcGIS network analysis to verify the preliminary results of the scheme. This study takes the ground floor of Meicai Area as a project space, exploring the spatial repair approach for pedestrian system, expecting to inject new vitality into the ground floor of the city and to respond to the new requirements of a more composite and integrated daily public life in the city. It is hoped that it would provide ideas and reference strategy for the construction and repair of the pedestrian system in three dimension in the future.