Where Sidewalks Never End

Mai Okimoto
August 2025

Galeria do Rock (Edifício Grandes Galerias ) completed 1963 by Siffredi & Bardelli. Photo by author.

Having tap-danced my way through a crowd large enough to halt traffic, and power-walked past shuttered buildings (streets too quiet for my tourist comfort), I wasn’t sure what to expect upon reaching República. Like other parts of São Paulo’s Downtown district, many buildings were covered in graffiti and had clearly seen better days. Then, tucked behind its neighbors, Galeria do Rock’s concave façade appeared like a pair of outstretched, welcoming arms. Painted traffic-orange and illuminated by an almost excessive number of recessed lights, the open-air façade offered fleeting glimpses of the Saturday afternoon crowd browsing sneaker shops, tattoo and piercing parlors, and record stores. 

At the ground level, the sidewalk gave way to a covered, open-air walkway split into two tiers and lined with stores on both sides. Walking down the central ramp to the lower tier, I was surprised to find it wasn’t a basement at all, but at grade with the entrance on the opposite side of the block—a covered alleyway following the slope of the terrain. Punched openings in the ceiling broke the confines of the narrow rectangular footprint, admitting not only light but also fleeting visual and aural glimpses of activity on the floors above. Repeated on multiple levels like a vertical enfilade, these openings extended the visual field far beyond a single floor.

Several hours and multiple detours later, I found myself in the snaking arcade of the Copan Building (Oscar Niemeyer, c. 1966), on the southern edge of República. I had covered about one kilometer—roughly the length of ten soccer fields—moving through buildings rather than along streets. Galeria do Rock was certainly memorable for its visuals and energy, but the elements that fostered publicness were not unique to República. 

Known as Centro Novo and considered São Paulo’s commercial hub until the 1970s, the area underwent rapid densification and verticalization between the 1930s and 1960s under Mayor Francisco Prestes Maia, an architect and urbanist turned politician. Prestes Maia became mayor of São Paulo at a time when the city’s population, land area, and economy were undergoing exponential growth and rapid transformation. Appointed to the post during the authoritarian Vargas Era and later elected by popular vote, he advanced policies that proposed, among other things, a car-oriented radial road system to accommodate the city’s expansion, planned verticalization, and public spaces in key areas such as República. He introduced a regulation requiring new buildings of 20 or more floors to include a ground-floor passage with entrances of specified widths, later enforcing it to all new buildings in Centro Novo [1]. In addition to these planning policies, which spurred real estate speculation and rapid construction in Centro Novo, Prestes Maia promoted design competitions to ensure the quality of new buildings.

Site diagram of República (enlarged). Image by author [2].

Notable examples of buildings from this era include Galeria Metrópole (Gian Carlo Gasperini and João Artacho Jurado, c. 1964), Edifício Itália (Franz Heep, c. 1965), Edifício Copan, and Galeria Nova Barão (c. 1962) and Galeria do Rock (c. 1963 both by Siffredi & Bardelli). Although the buildings are not physically connected, their scale—combined with the open-air spaces that span entire floors—creates a sense of proximity and integrates the upper levels into the public streetscape. These spaces also reflect the lingering legacy of modernist principles that valued natural light and airflow, well suited to São Paulo’s subtropical climate before the widespread adoption of air conditioning.

A more recent addition to República is SESC 24 de Maio (MMBB Arquitetos and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, c. 2017)[3]. A multi-purpose complex for arts, culture, athletics, and leisure converted from an old department store, the project incorporates vertical elements found in its older neighbors to create a multi-story public space for both members and visitors. Its ramp functions as an extension of the public street, encouraging exploration of the building’s fifteen floors—many of them open-air, offering expansive views into surrounding buildings as well as the street below. Everyone is welcome to linger; no one is challenged for loitering. While built to serve SESC members, SESC 24 de Maio also acts as a vertical extension of the República streetscape.

While República has once again become a popular destination, it was largely abandoned for many years after businesses relocated to other neighborhoods in the 1970s. Buildings from the first half of the 20th century could not fully accommodate the city’s growing population or the shifts in lifestyle and technology [4]. Although roads around República were reorganized and widened to make way for the coming surge in vehicular traffic, the streets within the neighborhood were mostly left untouched, eventually becoming pedestrian-only or one-way. Along with limited access to major thoroughfares, few buildings offered adequate parking at a time when the automobile industry was being promoted and public transportation remained scarce [5]. The result is a neighborhood that can feel like an oasis for pedestrians, yet also an island isolated from the rest of the city.

Because of Prestes Maia’s policies, the ground floor of most—if not all—buildings in República functions as a covered public passage, cutting through blocks to connect streets. Although each passage is a discrete element of its building and legally private property, its ubiquity and integration with public streets make it a convenient alternative route. By introducing a finer grain to the grid of city blocks—and thereby reducing the blocks’ dominance in the urban fabric—these passages blur the boundaries between public and private, and between exterior and interior. Entrances are often roll-up gates, not doors, spanning the full width of the street-facing façade. Kept open during business hours, these thresholds offer no deterrent to entry and invite anyone to stroll through.

From above, República appears as a dense neighborhood of mid- and high-rise buildings, packed into city blocks twice the size of Manhattan’s and divided by narrow one-way streets or pedestrian lanes. In plan, it tells a familiar metropolitan story of density and verticalization—a collage of self-contained, privatized enclaves marked by schisms between streets and buildings, among buildings themselves, and across floors. At street level, however, the view shifts: a neighborhood stitched together by a network of sidewalks that extend not only horizontally but also vertically.

República’s continuous sidewalks emerged from the intersection of a particular sociopolitical climate, economic interests, and the technologies of their time. While limited access may have contributed to the area’s decline in the 1970s, its resurgence over the past two decades points to the enduring appeal of interior-exterior ambiguity, the unbroken sidewalks, and the myriad social exchanges they foster.

Galeria do Rock (Edifício Grandes Galerias ) completed 1963 by Siffredi & Bardelli. Photo by author.

Galeria do Rock (Edifício Grandes Galerias ) by Siffredi & Bardelli completed in 1963. Photo by author.

SESC 24 de Maio by MMBB Arquitetos and Paulo Mendes da Rocha completed in 2017. Photo by author.

SESC 24 de Maio by MMBB Arquitetos and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, completed in 2017. Photo by author.

Galeria do Reggae (Centro Comercial Presidente) by Siffredi & Bardelli completed in 1962. Photo by author.

Galeria Nova Barão by Siffredi & Bardelli completed in 1962. Photo by author.

[1] Decree No. 41 (1940) and Decree No. 92 (1941). Source:  Böhm, Ulrike, Katja Benfer, and Cyrus Zahiri. 2023. São Paulo Heterotopia: Urbane Räume in der Schwebe = urban spaces in suspense. Transcript Publishing.

[2] Reference: Böhm, Ulrike, Katja Benfer, and Cyrus Zahiri. 2023. São Paulo Heterotopia: Urbane Räume in der Schwebe = urban spaces in suspense. Transcript Publishing.

[3] Serviço Social do Comércio (SESC) is a private non-profit organization sponsored by Brazilian businesses for the benefit and welfare of their employees. They operate numerous facilities serving members in various locations throughout the country.

[4] São Paulo’s population increased from 1 million to 7 million between 1929-1974. Source: Costa, Adriano Borges, Christopher Zegras, and Ciro Biderman. “Chasing the City That Cannot Stop: Exploring Transportation and Urban Co-Development in São Paulo’s History.” Journal of Transport and Land Use 14, no. 1 (2021): 1092. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48646223.

[5] Stevens, Jeroen. “Occupied City: Hotel Cambridge and Central São Paulo between Urban Decay and Resurrection.” In From Conflict to Inclusion in Housing: Interaction of Communities, Residents and Activists, edited by Graham Cairns, Georgios Artopoulos, and Kirsten Day, 1, pp 27. UCL Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1xhr55k.8.

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Mai Okimoto edits for Architecture Writing Workshop and works as an architect in Houston.

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>>The Sidewalk Issue

A Concrete Event

Lauren Phillips
August 2025

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

—Shel Siverstein [1]

Photograph of the book Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein.

There is a place where the sidewalk ends. There are many such places—though few of them resemble the threshold of possibility Shel Silverstein imagined in 1974. His sidewalk ends in wonder, in peppermint wind and chalk-white arrows leading the child out of the city and into something gentler, freer, and more true.

In most newer American cities—especially those shaped by the logic of dispersal—sidewalks end in stranger, lonelier ways. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The responsibility to care for others, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas proposes, begins not with doctrine or law, but with the face of other human beings—a presence that cannot be ignored and that demands a response [2]. In this sense, the sidewalk can become a place where the proximity of others reminds us that we share the world, and that our freedom is not solitary.

Understanding how and why sidewalks end requires attention to the larger patterns of development that shape them. The sidewalk is not merely a material feature of the city; it is a product of form, policy, and intention. Its presence—or absence—registers more than a design decision: it reflects how the city organizes movement, connection, and care.

One way to look at these broader development patterns is through the lens of inward and outward urban growth [3]. The latter—dense, connective, and oriented around regular street grids—draws movement inward, fostering proximity, encounter, and civic interaction. An example of this is New York City. The sidewalk, in this context, has the potential to become not merely an accessory to movement but a generator of productive friction—a space where competing rhythms and bodies overlap, negotiate, and adjust. It is through this low-grade resistance that civic life emerges: not from consensus, but from contact. The outward-looking city, by contrast, disperses away from the center: it branches into cul-de-sacs, arterials, and feeder roads, replacing the grid with the loop and the plaza with the parking lot. An example is Houston. Sidewalks in these environments are often poured not as connective infrastructure, but to satisfy code (or even aspirational) needs: narrow ribbons of concrete trailing past retention ponds, utility easements, and mailbox clusters, present in form but emptied of civic content. 

Sidewalk Typologies

In dense cities, the sidewalk is the commons: collective ground maintained for collective use. It runs alongside buildings with stoops, shops with windows, homes with porches—spaces of invitation and address. Its care is distributed. Its value is implicit. It is not just infrastructure, but a medium of shared life.

This adjacency—the overlap between civic and domestic—forms the basis for the sidewalk’s ethical and civic potential. Here, movement generates encounters: the brush of a shoulder, a glance exchanged, the sidestep that accommodates a stroller or a dog. These are small moments of friction, but they are also moments of acknowledgment. They register the presence of others and, in doing so, begin to model responsibility (of the kind Levinas had hoped for).

These fleeting exchanges—mundane, unspectacular—form the microstructure of civic life. They are not grand gestures of solidarity, but habits of regard. And it is through these habits that the public realm acquires texture and meaning.

When adjacency is lost, as in dispersed cities, so is this texture. The sidewalk runs the risk of becoming a sliver of poured concrete without a trace of spatial or social attachment; one that runs beside drainage ditches, backs of fences, the buffer zones of zoning… no longer a threshold but a seam. The storefront, the stoop, the passerby—all gone. The resulting sidewalk can become a corridor of motion with no address, no friction, and no face.

Take, for example, a series of conditions typically encountered in cities with sprawl:

• The Fade-Out – A soft ending in which the sidewalk gives way to grass or gravel. A passive tapering, more omission than conclusion.

• The Sudden Stop – An abrupt termination at a physical barrier or property line, offering no transition or alternative route.

• The Placeholder – Infrastructure installed to satisfy code but lacking context, continuity, or utility. Sidewalks in name only.

• The Ghostwalk – Sidewalks devoid of human adjacency, passing the backs of lots or easements with no interface or address.

• The Loop – Circuits intended for recreation rather than connection. Complete within themselves, but severed from the urban whole.

  
  

Together, these conditions describe a civic diminishment: a moment where movement fragments, where connectivity falters, and where the sidewalk ceases to function as shared ground. These terminations are not neutral—they index a larger breakdown of adjacency, responsibility, and civic form. They are not simply the end of walking routes, but of the urban ideals those routes once expressed.

The End?

Silverstein imagines a sidewalk that gives way to magic—where the "chalk-white arrows go" and "the moon-bird rests from his flight."

Whether sidewalks today end in wonder or incompletion—there remains something poignant, and even deeply human, about these paths. They are gestures (if not fully realized ones) toward the phenomenon of the body in space—to the simple but radical act of moving on foot through the built environment. They are glimpses of a civic imagination that, however threadbare, continues to negotiate the body’s terms. In their very incompleteness, they offer a space of interpretive generosity, a spatial form that, in civic absence, still allows for the possibility of movement, pause, and reflection. You can still walk them, and they are built for you—even if no one seems entirely sure who that "you" is anymore.

The sidewalk does not always lead us where we hoped—if it leads anywhere at all. But it is there, waiting for us, at the edge.

[1] Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

[2] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 194.

[3] In his theoretical work on postwar urban development, Ladders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), Albert Pope distinguishes between centrifugal (moving away from the center) and centripetal (moving toward the center) urban forms. These are exemplified by the more traditional gridded city, oriented toward the pedestrian, and the more hierarchical systems of branching streets oriented to the automobile. I draw on Pope’s work to make this distinction.

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Lauren Phillips edits for Architecture Writing Workshop. He is an Assistant Professor at Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

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>>The Sidewalk Issue

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.

As for the distinction, publicness refers to accessibility—the fact that a space is open to everyone. Civic identity, for me, is about something more. It’s a space so well-constructed and well-designed that it not only serves the public, but also becomes a source of public pride. It reflects an investment in shared life. That’s what I mean by civic—not just public in function, but formally and symbolically public as well. 

UN: I wonder whether the 20th century was the exception rather than the rule. Maybe what we think of as “public space”—with its open, accessible, civic qualities—really only emerged during a specific historical window.

If you look back at 19th-century London, many of the so-called public squares, like the garden squares in Bloomsbury, were fenced off, controlled by private trusts, and closed after 6 p.m. They weren’t truly public. So maybe what we’re seeing now isn’t a new crisis, but a return to earlier patterns.

FC: That's a fascinating point—and I think it's important to distinguish between different kinds of space.

What I was referring to earlier is specifically the privatization of streets. That, for me, is the more concerning trend. We're now seeing increasing numbers of private streets—spaces that once formed the connective tissue of public life—now being treated as assets or amenities.

PS: You could take this a few different ways. One is to argue—and maybe we need to take this seriously—that we actually got a more generous public realm from the robber barons of the 18th and 19th centuries than we’re likely to get from Google, with its Sidewalk Labs proposal in Toronto, or from Hudson Yards.

Or perhaps we should emphasize historical continuities—the persistence of certain modes of ownership and exclusion.

I’m reminded of that Robert Venturi quote: “Americans don’t need piazzas because they have television sets.” I realize I’ve just introduced piazzas in a conversation about sidewalks, but I mention it because on one level, it reflects an anti-urban tendency in American culture—one that goes back to Jefferson, or even earlier, depending on how you trace it. But on another level, it raises the question: What exactly do we want from a public realm?

Do we want a physical space where we can confront each other, be in proximity, argue, show up in person? Or has the public realm long been mediated—from the printing press, to television, to Twitter? Maybe it hasn’t been a purely physical agora for centuries.

Still, I’d argue that we’re now seeing some of the political consequences of removing politics from the sidewalk and relocating it entirely to social media. That shift may be killing off the kind of public space that Baird or Arendt described—or maybe, just maybe, it will provoke a backlash.

Will it get us anywhere? Who knows. But maybe ten years from now, we’ll be walking around with newspapers, discussing editorials in the park—deliberately, because we’ve seen what the alternative looks like.

SLC: If it’s true that sidewalks are moving in these different directions, on one hand toward privatization, and on the other toward increasing digital mediation, what happens when we do design a sidewalk?

We talked earlier about how sidewalks are never really singular—they’re always shaped by the systems and environments around them. So what happens if you install a sidewalk in a space that doesn’t have that surrounding support—no density, no adjacent uses, no active edges?

Maybe the broader question here is: where are sidewalks headed in the future? Especially in relation to things like technology, culture, and privatization?

UN: I want to be optimistic, especially responding to Peter’s point about the possibility of a backlash. I’m not sure “backlash” is quite the right word, but I do feel that in my own life, the sidewalk has become a more attractive space—even a space for political conversations, and those conversations are completely different from what happens on Twitter.

It’s actually kind of remarkable how many people with different opinions you can meet just by being on the sidewalk. There’s a barbershop next door to my office with a couple of chairs and a table out front. People sit there. I sit there. And we talk. And it’s a great experience. Everyone’s living in their own ideological bubbles online, sure. But when you talk to them in person, you realize they’re just normal people. You find things in common. It’s meaningful.

So maybe the agora or the piazza isn’t coming back, but the sidewalk, at least on my little street, feels vibrant and very much alive. And I think that matters. Every coffee shop with a couple of tables out front seems to thrive here in Toronto. It’s almost underrated how important that everyday public edge is.

FC: I think the shift of so many aspects of public life into a kind of public sphere (in the Habermasian sense) has had a huge impact. It’s no longer tied to physical space, and that change has reshaped the sidewalk and the physical character of the street.

One very visible effect—especially here in New York, but also in many other cities—is that ground-floor retail is dead. On the one hand, you could see that as the end of the sidewalk. We've lost a critical adjacency that traditionally activated public space.

But on the other hand, it’s opened up new possibilities. We're now seeing all sorts of pop-up events, independent stores, and culinary festivals that could never have afforded ground-floor space before. These uses bring a level of energy and experimentation that wasn’t possible when only banks and pharmacies could afford the rent.

So yes, while the traditional sidewalk-adjacent storefront is vanishing, new forms of public life are emerging in its place.

At the same time, I think the street section itself—the physical cross-section of the public realm—is undergoing a profound shift, driven both by politics and by technological change. Over the next 20 to 30 years, I think we’re going to see a dramatic re-articulation of the street through the arrival of autonomous vehicles. A recent book by a former student of mine, Evan Shieh’s Autonomous Urbanism, makes a compelling argument: we shouldn't wait for technology to dictate the shape of our cities. Instead, we need to proactively define the kind of civic landscape we want, and then determine how autonomous vehicles can fit into that vision.

So for me, now is the time for design to be ambitious. We should begin to imagine—even hallucinate about—what kinds of new public spaces might be possible over the next two or three decades given these technological transformations.

PS: Occasionally, we get these brief moments—a city marathon, a Christmas parade—when we actually challenge the street section. And I think that’s the larger point Felipe is raising: we’re at a moment where we can either wait for technology—like autonomous vehicles—to bring a new revolution (as the car did between 1919 and 1950), or we can take a more active stance, like the people on that bridge in Berlin, sticking their feet into the road and reclaiming space.

The way we divide public space is insane. The poverty of space allocated to the sidewalk, compared to the generosity lavished on the car, is indefensible. And now may be a unique moment to challenge that. But I’ll take my turn to be the pessimist. Imagine if every sidewalk were as wide as a single car lane—what would that change?

UN: The real issue is political. It's a struggle over the street, and we’re going to have to stick our feet into it—as the Berliners do—and take back the space.

PS: Maybe this isn’t the right place to end, but there’s something we haven’t touched on yet—and it comes from Baird, particularly in his writing on the space of appearance.

He’s part of that generation of urbanists in the ’70s and ’80s responding to the anti-urbanism of the 1950s and ’60s—responding, perhaps, to the collapse (or at least the exhaustion) of the modernist urban project, and trying to recover and reassert a public life rooted in the street.

One way Baird defines public space is as a space that carries a certain degree of risk. That’s because, drawing from Arendt, he sees public space as the site of action—not just movement, but political appearance. In his book Street Photography, he illustrates this through photographs: everything from people going about their daily routines to images of political protest. These are all examples of action in the public realm.

And I think this raises a difficult but essential question: What degree of risk are we willing to accept in public? How do we perceive that risk? That’s a political question, and we’re seeing it play out right now.

You see it in the debates about the New York City subway. You see it in Toronto, in how people talk about unhoused individuals in subway stations. You see it in Los Angeles. And you see it in how we talk about order and disorder on the sidewalk. Disorder on the sidewalk has become a politically charged issue, and that’s precisely because sidewalks are public. They’re where we see one another. They’re where we encounter things we may not want to see.

Is this a tension we should accept as part of what makes sidewalks valuable? Or is it something we try to regulate away?

UN: I think you’re touching on something really important, Peter. In most of our lives—in the car, at home, at work, on our phones—we’re sheltered. But on the sidewalk, anything can happen. It’s unpredictable. There’s a real sense of danger, or at least of encounter—of meeting the Other, which you can usually avoid just by turning off your phone. And I think that’s crucial to understanding what a sidewalk is. 

Part of why I feel so optimistic about the sidewalk as a space for encountering others is because all the other forums for public discourse, especially digital ones, have become surveilled and constrained. Sidewalks, by contrast, still offer a kind of free space. You can talk without your words being recorded. It’s also a little dangerous—someone could punch you, I guess!—but that risk is part of the vitality. It’s freeing. It’s liberating to speak and let the words disappear.

SLC: That idea of risk, or maybe a more everyday term like uncertainty, seems central. At home, on your phone, even in your car, you’re in a kind of capsule. You control the inputs. But out on the sidewalk, you’re exposed. And it reminded me of something I read earlier today in Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People. He describes how, in places where people start to feel unsafe on the street, they begin to bunker in. They retreat into private space. So that uncertainty disappears—but so does the social world.

FC: I think ultimately, publicness only really becomes meaningful when the urban conditions support it. Sidewalks depend on density, on the people and the cosmopolitan context around them. There’s nothing more terrifying than being out on a sidewalk at 3:00 a.m. alone. 

And to the broader point about the disappearance of public space, I think what we’re actually starting to see in major cities is a shift. Cities are beginning to invest in their public realms again. Because as everything else moves to non-spatial spheres (remote work, online platforms, private messaging, etc.) people need physical places to encounter one another.

PS: Should we think of this in a Cerdà kind of way? That is, say there’s a certain range of behaviors that animate a public realm. Beyond that range, either in terms of content or intensity, should things be excluded (because they alienate others, or drive them away)? 

Or do we want to defend a more radical idea of publicness—one where the sidewalk’s value lies in its absolute openness, in the fact that it reflects and reveals the state of the world around it?

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Felipe Correa is the founding Partner of Somatic Collaborative, a research based design practice in New York City. He is the author of multiple books including São Paulo: A Graphic Biography and Beyond the City: Resource Extraction Urbanism in South America. 

Uros Novakovic is a Founding Partner of Office Ou, a Toronto-based practice for architecture, landscape, and strategy. Everyday, Uros can be seen on the sidewalks of Bloor Street West and St.Clair West.

Peter Sealy is an architectural historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through media such as film and photography. He directs the undergraduate Architectural Studies program at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty.

Sebastián López Cardozo edits for Architecture Writing Workshop and works as an architectural designer in Toronto.

Mai Okimoto edits for Architecture Writing Workshop and works as an architect in Houston.

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>>The Sidewalk Issue

Parking Landscapes

Microcosms of Houston

Pouya Khadem and Mai Okimoto
April 2025

Houston checks all the boxes of the American city: highways, strip malls, parking lots. But it takes driving—seeing its rawness firsthand—to begin to understand what draws people to a place that can seem, at first, so desolate. There’s a harshness to this landscape, its wet heat, endless asphalt, and, above all, its emptiness. It’s easy to imagine that most of the city’s seven million residents are in constant motion—and that the city itself exists within that motion, illuminated and transient.

But Houston is also this: the sun-baked signage lining the roadside; the low, stretched-out buildings they beckon toward, advertising a Washateria here, a bún suông place there, a nail salon, the check cashers. A simple turn off the road, a pause in the flow, reveals something more. Despite their shared vocabulary of unassuming forms, each cluster of buildings is a mikrokosmos of language, texture, and culture. In these spaces, the strip mall becomes not an afterthought, but something closer to a civic core. The photographs that follow are a modest record of this vast, overlooked terrain—a contribution to the many stories told about the American strip mall.

Southwest Freeway, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.

11550 Bellaire Boulevard, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.

6742 Hillcroft Avenue, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.

6742 Hillcroft Avenue, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.

6000 S Gessner Drive, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.

6000 S Gessner Drive, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.

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Pouya Khadem edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. He works as an architectural designer in Houston.

Mai Okimoto edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. She works in Houston.

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>>The Sidewalk Issue