StreetReader
Thesis → live platform
My thesis on Gran Vía, turned into a live urban data platform.
Brief
Gran Vía is promoted as one of Madrid's most sustainable streets, through Madrid Central and Madrid 360. But walk it and it tells a different story. My thesis started from that gap: sustainability as it is reported, versus sustainability as it is lived.
Research
Three months of iterative fieldwork.
- Walking, observation, sound recording, smell-walks and mapping, at different times and days.
- A digital walk: 100+ online reviews scraped and read for friction words like exhausting, crowded, sirens, stress.
- A Solarpunk framework with four pillars: ecological integration, spatial justice, organic design, and participatory planning.
Findings
- A high-performance corridor: built for flow, not for staying. You aren't really walking, you're managing.
- A perpetual acoustic baseline: a constant low hum of buses, taxis, deliveries and shopfront music.
- Pay-to-stay rest: free seating is scarce, shade is broken, resting usually means buying something.
- Controlled ecology: trees exist, but nature never shapes the experience of the street.
Gran Vía is a success on a spreadsheet, but an experiential failure on the ground.
The platform
The physical street is locked by heritage rules, commerce and traffic. Its information layer is wide open. StreetReader is a 3D participatory archive of Gran Vía: sensory data layers (thermal, acoustic, atmospheric) on a 3D model of the street, and a collective feed where anyone can pin a lived experience. Bilingual (English and Spanish), open-source, low-barrier.
How it's built: React · Three.js (React Three Fiber) · Supabase · Tailwind
The title screen: perceived reality v/s lived reality. Outcome
A transferable Solarpunk framework for questioning what makes a street sustainable, and a live platform that turns the measured city back into a lived one.