Densify a park: From Tower in the Park to Park in the Tower.
Author: Lijing Yu, Yuexi Xu, Eunjin Yoo
“What if more vertical public spaces are created for residents, and offering them a more just space to live?”1. Project Overview
As today the population has grown, the demand for housing and workspace has increased. However, providing more housing and workspace in confined urban areas can reduce the area of public space and its quality including accessibility and sunlight with a reduction in commercial spaces in the public space.
“What if the outdoor public space was distributed vertically with the increased area of housing and workspace?”Goals and Metrics
- Goals:
Providing more housing, workspace, and commercial space while not decreasing the outdoor public space and its quality such as walkability and having enough sunlight.
2. What are we measuring?
1) Amount of Open Space: Create sufficient public green space in the neighborhood that more than 109 sq ft park space per person
2) The quality of parks space:
- Beneficial Daylight during cold months (March is good, % of the open space that has more than 3 hours daylight during cold months)
- Shade during the hot months (June is good.＜6h)
- Accessibility (70% of the population that can access a comfortable park within 5 min or 109 Avg sq ft of comfortable park per person within 5 min.)
- View: Maintain enough view for surrounding buildings and the vertical open spaces (% of the open space area can have good view）
3) Relevant external data: Access to surrounding amenity and subway station
3. Why are we measuring them?
Providing enough green space per person and keeping its quality throughout the year.
What Did We Discover?
The site, Union Square Park, includes New York Community District 5 and the area of park per 1,000 persons is smaller than the average area of parks persons in New York. Also, 56% of residents in CD5 have accessibility to parks within a 5-minute walk.
“Can walkability to open space be improved?”2. Computational Design Model
Analysis Tools
Custom Tool - Beneficial Sunlight of Building Facade and Open Spaces
This tool shows how to visualize beneficial sunlight for both building facade and open spaces, including ground-level parks, and vertical public spaces. Visualization is shown according to the composite number of beneficial sunlight, considering both harmful sunlight in summer and beneficial sunlight in winter.
Read the Detail Description here.
Procedural Types
Design Space
Inputs
Building Types
Street Grids
3. Analysis and Results
Exploring the Design Space
“What if we create buildings with beneficial sunlight during the year, while not decrease the good view rate from the open spaces?”Results
Conclusions and Next Steps
As the development of the city on the ground level already becomes saturated, many designers or urban planners are faced with a problem like providing more area for housing and workspace can affect the area of public open space. In this case, they can use the methodology implemented by “Vertical Public Realm” for maintaining and distributing the area of public open space vertically.
The next steps for implementing the “Vertical Public Realm” methodology should be geared towards the analysis of resident density and required size of the public area for individuals and many people for containing more various city events. Also, by considering the distance and view between housings and public spaces, privacy should be secured.
