The ground floor as an urban interface: the human-building relationship and the Loss of Urban Contact

Abstract

Urban design and planning often treat the city as an abstract composition seen from above, giving priority to form, order, and large-scale spatial organization. This is the reason why the experience of the city at street level remains in the background. Within this condition, the ground floor becomes particularly important, since it forms the point of direct contact between the street, the pedestrian, and building. The ground floor in this study is treated as an urban interface by examining how spatial and morphological factors affect the urban environment, the legibility of public spaces and the perception of the pedestrian.
This study focuses on some selected segments in the city of Shkodra, Albania. Shkodra is shaped by the coexistence of several historical layers, transitional conditions, and contemporary interventions. This allows the selected segments to be read comparatively across different urban periods. Based on this, we understand how the building influenced by different periods builds or weakens the relationship with the street and the urban environment. The methodology focuses on direct observation, morphological analysis, photographic documentation. Attention is focused on some specific elements that create an active urban front. These elements have to do with rhythms, relationships between the interior and exterior, the articulation of thresholds, relationships between the building and the public space. These enable some conditions that enable interaction, daily use, stopping, communication.
The analysis suggests that urban fronts characterized by frequent subdivisions, multiple entrances, articulated thresholds, and stronger building street relations tend to support more intense forms of urban contact and public continuity. The urban fronts that belong to contemporary and post-socialist interventions are characterized by monotonous, continuous facades, with edges dominated by services and parking. These conditions weaken the mediating role of the ground floor and reduce the street to a corridor of passage However, the value of the ground floor lies not in its historical from itself, but in its capacity to support presence, legibility at the human scale, exchange, and interaction. In this sense, a more legible, more experiential, more inclusive urban environment comes from the revaluation of the ground floor.

Keywords: pedestrian experience, urban interface, human scale, street-level urbanism, active front