Before the Chase Centre opened in September in San Francisco's Mission Bay, developers knew the $US1.6 billion ($2.3 billion) basketball arena had to be more than the home of the Golden State Warriors. They wanted it to be a community gathering space, too.

"If you go to Chase Centre, you're not just going to one place," said René Bihan, a principal at SWA Group, the arena's landscape architect. "You're going to start in one place and wind up in another one and go through several different experiences when you get there."