Common Ground
A Conversation with Felipe Correa,
Uros Novakovic, and Peter Sealy
August 2025
A sidewalk may be thought of as belonging to a conceptual system that regulates its overall qualities and characteristics—it is the product of a collective will, expressed through zoning bylaws, past and present.
A sidewalk is transformed by the particularities it meets: It is bordered by individual buildings and lots in diverse use. We experience sidewalks together with their surroundings, engaging not just their physical presence but also the smell, sound, and atmosphere around them.
There are many ways to understand the place of sidewalks, and many ways to design them. This summer, AWW editors Mai Okimoto and Sebastián López Cardozo caught up with Felipe Correa, Uros Novakovic, and Peter Sealy to shed light on some of these questions.
Mai Okimoto (MO): Each of you practice at different scales—the region, the neighborhood, the block, the lot—and through different media: writing, images, various representational styles, and physical buildings. How does your engagement with sidewalks take place in your work?
Felipe Correa (FC): Sidewalks are always at the forefront of discussions across many different scales of urbanism, but they can never really be defined on their own. They're always defined by something else: by the adjacencies that surround them, by the political climate that structures a particular kind of open space—or the lack of public space altogether.
So, in my practice, I’ve always found the sidewalk to be a crucial element, but never a singular one. It always has to do with how you conceive its adjacencies, its densities, its activity, and its civic dimension. Those are the things that bring together a broader set of issues and conditions, and they’re what give the sidewalk its specific quality.
In many ways, to design a good sidewalk, you have to design everything but the sidewalk. You have to work at a larger scale, because it’s all those other systems that shape what the sidewalk becomes.
The idea of the sidewalk is actually very new. It only emerges when the street becomes occupied by other forms of mobility beyond walking. It’s also interesting to look at the sidewalk in relation to the longer history of that space—the space it occupies within the street’s cross-section.
Uros Novakovic (UN): Something I learned when I was working in the UK was that they don’t use the word sidewalk. They use the word pavement instead, which comes from a slightly different history.
The reason sidewalks emerged in North America is because people were gradually restricted to the sides of the road. That became the only place we were allowed to be, because the largest portion of the street—the right of way—was given over to cars. And that didn’t happen just because cars emerged as a new technology. It happened through lobbying by automobile companies, and eventually through legislation.
There was a time when jaywalking didn’t exist as a concept. People could walk wherever they wanted, and cars had to navigate their way around us. That’s no longer the case.
So it was this kind of legislation that brought about what we now call sidewalks—something separate and defined, as opposed to just part of the street.
Peter Sealy (PS): My way of exploring a city is always by walking it. That means there are some cities I’m almost destined to fall in love with, simply because they can be walked. Others, for various historical or climatic reasons, are not good for exploring on foot—and that creates a completely different relationship to them.
A couple of thoughts on the sidewalk—or interests, I should say, come to mind. I’m a historian of architectural media, particularly architectural photography, and I’ve always been drawn to traditions of street photography—representations of the city created through movement. But notice, we call it street photography, even though many of the iconic images were actually taken from or on the sidewalk. There is also what I learned from Professor George Baird’s interpretations of Hannah Arendt—her ideas of the public realm and the space of appearance.
For Arendt, the separation of public and private spheres–which she felt was essential–had been increasingly blurred by modern societies. Public space–with its potential for civic “appearance” in the form of political action (words and deeds)–had been subsumed into the commercial satisfaction of materialist desires. Adapting Arendt’s notion to architecture and urbanism, Baird insisted that this “space of appearance” must be tangible and material. Public space for Baird needs plurality, mobility, and history; it is “rough space,” where one is vulnerable.
In both street photography and in Baird’s readings of Arendt’s work, the boundary between the street and sidewalk is often blurred. At what point are we referring specifically to the sidewalk? And what does that imply—that it’s raised, that it’s to the side, that it has a different legal status? Or are we really talking about the action of walking in the city, which often takes place on the sidewalk, but sometimes (and maybe most powerfully), happens on the street itself?
Sebastián López Cardozo (SLC): If the sidewalk is “crucially important but never singular,” as Felipe put it, is that ambiguity a strength or a weakness?
For instance, when you’re designing a building, there’s rarely a dedicated “sidewalk designer.” Everyone contributes to it indirectly—through edges, transitions, thresholds. What does it mean to work on something so central and yet so distributed?
UN: I think Felipe made a really good point—that we hardly ever design the sidewalk itself. We design the things around it, which in turn define its qualities.
But instinctively, I want to push back a little. Sometimes we do need to design the sidewalk directly, and we rarely get the chance. As a practice, we’ve never had a sidewalk commission. I’d love to do one—just a sidewalk, on its own terms. There’s a lot of potential there.
Several of us have touched on this—maybe Peter most directly with the idea of the space of appearance—but the sidewalk, in a civic sense, is where we interact with others. It’s where we negotiate space, present ourselves publicly, and become part of a shared experience. It’s a really fascinating part of daily life.\
My office, for example, faces a sidewalk on a small side street in Toronto. It’s a residential street and fairly quiet, but the things that take place are incredibly varied and often very personal. Just a few hours ago, I witnessed a couple, who I presume had recently broken up, exchanging their dog. They had a small argument right in front of my window. And I was part of that moment, just by virtue of it happening on the sidewalk. That’s the magic of it. We’re all part of a body politic, simply by being there.
Office Ou storefront in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Sebastián López Cardozo.
Thinking again, I’m reminded of the sidewalks in Prague, where I grew up. All the sidewalks there are made of a very particular kind of cobblestones: small, precise stones, much smaller than those used on the street. At first, I just thought it was beautiful—an elegant alternative to the utilitarian concrete sidewalks we have in Toronto.
Toronto’s concrete sidewalks are basically fine, but they fail when something needs to be repaired. A worker has to come in with a massive saw to cut the slab. It’s loud, disruptive, and the whole system breaks down. You can’t have a conversation, it’s unpleasant to walk through, and it interrupts daily life. In Prague, when a repair is needed, a worker shows up with a small hammer. He gently lifts the cobblestones, makes the repair, and puts them back in place. You hardly even notice him. The sidewalk accommodates maintenance without disrupting the flow of the city.
So that’s my thought on actually designing the sidewalk. I’d love to design one that isn’t too precious—not as elaborate as the cobblestone streets of Prague—but something that still has that capacity to integrate repair seamlessly into urban life, the way a good sidewalk should.
FC: When I said we design everything except the sidewalk, what I meant is that we rarely design it in isolation. Yes, we do design the sidewalk, but always in relation to other elements around it.
Uros, your comments reminded me of another fascinating aspect: not just the design of sidewalks, but their long-term management. And who manages them can vary dramatically from city to city.
Take New York, for example. Whoever fronts the sidewalk—typically the building owner—is responsible for building it according to city standards. But if a new building goes up, that developer is also responsible for redoing the sidewalk, maintaining it over time, and even covering liability if someone falls.
So the sidewalk becomes this complex legal apparatus. That legal dimension—the history of ownership, maintenance, and liability—adds another layer to how we conceptualize the sidewalk.
SLC: In New York, you could say the culture informs the policy, which in turn informs the sidewalk. There’s a clear connection there.
MO: Peter noted the blurred boundary between the sidewalk and the street earlier, and Felipe’s comment about property owners’ responsibility for the sidewalk maintenance makes the connection between sidewalks and private buildings hard to ignore, too.
It seems that while sidewalk has systematic qualities that independently regulate its overall characteristics, it’s also transformed by its local adjacencies—how it adjoins, or overlaps with, the street and the public on one side, and private space on the other. I’m curious whether there are certain physical or material characteristics that emphasize one overlap more than the other.
PS: There are countless factors—historical, cultural, economic—that shape sidewalk design far more than any kind of universal functionalism. Even something as basic as materiality varies enormously. In one place, cobblestone might be standard; elsewhere, it’s poured concrete. Dimensions shift. Accepted practices shift. And the degree to which the sidewalk is treated as an autonomous realm—versus the degree to which it merges with adjacent buildings or is encroached upon by private development—varies dramatically.
Mai’s use of the word systematic comes to mind here. Because on the one hand, the sidewalk clearly is a system—it has common design standards, and the ability to walk uninterrupted makes it as much a system as the subway, the sewer network, the street grid, or even an elevator.
And yet, at the same time, it’s deeply negotiated. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it snows. In cities like New York, Boston, or Toronto, sidewalk clearing is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner. In others, like Montreal, the city handles it. But even there, you quickly learn which streets are considered important—and which aren’t.
The same dynamics show up in design, especially in elements like benches, trees, newspaper boxes, and other forms of street furniture. These belong, at least in part, to the sidewalk’s design. And they reveal a lot—you can immediately tell which areas are designed to provide comfort, and which ones treat the sidewalk as an afterthought, or even as something to discourage public use.
FC: I think factors like culture and climate are incredibly important. But I’d also add something else: the particular moment in time, or historical period, in which attitudes toward the street have taken shape. Those attitudes have shifted dramatically.
Take, for example—and I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but a good one—Barcelona and the work of Ildefons Cerdà. Cerdà’s Eixample plan is one of the first truly global surveys of urban blocks and streets. And what’s remarkable is that, in developing that plan, Cerdà actually traveled extensively—which, in the mid-19th century, was no small feat. There was no Google Earth. He visited cities around the world like Buenos Aires and New York, and physically measured blocks, streets, and sidewalks.
In that sense, the Barcelona block wasn’t a collage or a copy; it was the result of what we might call a best practices study. And within that, the sidewalk was treated as a unifying civic element—a social condenser of sorts—that brought differences into alignment. The wealthy and the less wealthy shared the same sidewalk. It functioned as a kind of commons, a shared civic space with a strong egalitarian ethos.
Now compare that with a more recent example: downtown Minneapolis. Business leaders and local architects— influenced by Victor Gruen—conceived an extensive network of skywalks over six miles long, connecting buildings in the downtown core. And the effect is the opposite of what we see in Barcelona. These skywalks construct a segregated world, where those with particular jobs or economic means move mostly through interior spaces, elevated above the street.
Interior view of IDS Center in Minneapolis showing the relationship of the walkway system to the covered court. Photo by Felipe Correa.
Yes, that system responds to climate—Minneapolis is bitterly cold—but the consequence is clear: those who can afford to use the skywalks avoid the public sidewalk entirely. And those who can’t are left at street level. The division is visible and material.
You see a similar phenomenon in downtown Houston, but for the opposite climate. There, extreme heat and humidity have led to an extensive network of tunnels and internal connectors. Again, those with access avoid the sidewalk entirely.
So yes, climate plays a role, but so do cultural values, economic systems, and historical moments. And ultimately, I think we’re losing something. There’s a publicness the sidewalk provides—a civic dimension that historically brought people into contact with one another—that I fear is disappearing in many contemporary cities.
UN: There was a similar plan in Toronto back in the ‘60s or ‘70s for an elevated walkway around Nathan Phillips Square, but it never really took off. And Toronto might be fortunate in this regard. Our underground pedestrian network is actually very extensive. It runs through much of downtown, but it’s so labyrinthine and confusing that it can’t function as a full replacement for the sidewalk. It hasn’t supplanted the street as the primary way of moving through the city.
PS: Speaking of publicness on the sidewalk, I’m reminded of the Admiralbrücke, a bridge in Berlin where people tend to gather in the summer. There’s a great pizzeria nearby, and people bring beer and sit outside. The bridge has sidewalks on either side and a lane for cars in the middle.
The most comfortable way to sit? On the sidewalk, with your legs stretched out into the street—so every time a car comes by, it has to honk. The driver waits, and then thirty people all move their legs at once.
To me, this is ephemeral, but also really beautiful. There’s a slight element of danger, but it’s manageable. It’s not a pedestrian realm that’s completely dominant, but it’s not the realm of the automobile either. It’s a negotiated space, not just in terms of geometry, but through presence. The formal boundary between sidewalk and street is clear, but it’s softened by collective behavior. That negotiation, especially in the context of Berlin, feels meaningful.
Admiralbrücke (Admiral Bridge) in Berlin, Germany. Photo by Jonathan Janssens / plattenbaustudio, June 2016.
MO: In the examples we’ve heard so far, it seems the public is potentially contested. Felipe brought up a useful distinction between publicness and civic identity earlier: are streets and sidewalks themselves losing their civic identity, even as they remain public?
FC: I think it’s been happening throughout the 20th century—but just to clarify, I actually believe it’s publicness itself that’s disappearing.
By that I mean we’re increasingly seeing large-scale urban projects developed through public-private partnerships—often structured around business improvement districts or special zoning districts—that, in effect, privatize public space. These frameworks make it easier to finance urban development, especially in a world where the economic model has shifted: where private capital, rather than public infrastructure, now drives urban growth.
A good, if overused, example is Hudson Yards. The idea that you could have a superblock in Manhattan where the streets are, for all practical purposes, privatized would’ve been unthinkable in the first half of the 20th century. Compare that with Rockefeller Center. It’s essentially a megastructure in section, but composed of discrete blocks connected by genuinely public space at ground level. So yes, I think publicness—understood as shared, open, accessible space—is disappearing, and I find that deeply problematic. These spaces matter. And we saw just how much they matter during the pandemic, when many of these so-called public-private spaces were closed to avoid liability. That made it very clear which spaces were truly public, and which were not.
Aerial views of Hudson Yards (top) and Rockefeller Center (bottom) visualizing the relationship of each project to the Manhattan block.
