Urban Quality at the Pedestrian Level in Barcelona: Ground Floor Uses

The quality of urban space is influenced by the characteristics of the environment that is close to people. What happens on the ground floors of buildings is directly related to this idea of proximity to pedestrians. In this work, the uses of the ground floor of buildings are studied to understand the quality of urban space. For this purpose, we chose 12 study areas in different parts of Barcelona. Each of them has a boundary delimited by distances of 10 min on foot from a reference point. For this reason, the zones do not correspond with a homogeneous morphology and do not have the same surface area. In these areas, one color was assigned to each plot corresponding to one of the four categories of ground floor use that have been previously defined: residential, food, services, and others. This information was mapped with a geographical information system (GIS) resulting in 12 maps that show the distribution of ground floor uses in different sectors of Barcelona. The results show that ground floor uses characterize pedestrian routes along the streets, and that this characteristic usually cannot be extrapolated to a neighborhood scale.