Imagining a New Role for Rooftops in Omaha

I just returned from spending a few days in Omaha, Nebraska attending a conference and visiting a friend (an architect) who lives and works in the revitalized downtown district known as the Old Market.

While I was in town, she hosted a design exercise on her apartment building’s rooftop terrace posing the following problem: How can rooftops play a larger part in encouraging an active, urban lifestyle in cities like Omaha?

Photo Credit: April Rice

View from Rooftop Terrace

Inspired by the fact that the view from the rooftop makes destinations appear closer to each other than from the ground, the designers imagined installing a new way to travel through the city using public pathways connecting one rooftop park or vegetable garden with the next.

Clearly, for the rooftop to play a more active role in urban life, it needs to be seen as accessible from the street level. The High Line park in New York City, which converted an elevated railroad track into a linear park, has worked hard to install visual cues from the street level that entice passersby up to the floating park. One idea in the design exercise envisioned a mechanism to lower rooftop garden plots to the street level so that city restaurants and residents could purchase their vegetables directly from a rooftop farmer.  I saw another attempt to connect the street level with a rooftop terrace on Saturday: painters installed on a rooftop terrace overlooking the Farmer’s Market.

Like the High Line, these painters may represent the beginning of a trend — building density by expanding activity beyond the street level up into buildings and to their rooftops.


POSTSCRIPT
A few notes on how my friend has organized her daily routine to increase transportation flexibility:

• While she owns a car, she uses it mainly for trips to areas of the city too far to ride her bicycle and for longer road trips. 
• She parks a commuter bike at work and a road bike at her apartment. That way, she can cycle directly from her office to her gym or other activities in the afternoons. As a side note, her office also stores one corporate commuter bike to encourage staff to take an active form of transportation to lunch and meetings. 

• But, mostly she walks—back and forth to work (½ mile); to the two small grocery stores within a block or two of her apartment; and, to the restaurants, bars, and shops in the Old Market.