ground floor is not opening up high enough for a program
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The image is probably the most widely shared touchstone in planning: An urban building with apartments upstairs and a café on the ground floor. For any planner who came of age after The Death and Life of Great American Cities, this image encapsulates the field. Density. Mixed use. Pedestrian orientation. Human scale. Eyes on the street. The “Third Place.” Name your urbanist maxim, it’s in this picture.
For many planners, it is this image that first unlocked the idea of urbanism. Most of us have conjured it up repeatedly to explain the magic of cities to relatives, dates, dentists or party guests. But all too often it ends there. We rarely subject this image to much scrutiny, perhaps because it’s so useful, and because achieving anything resembling it has consumed the careers of a generation of planners.
It took the Jane Jacobs generation to rescue the ground floor from insignificance, and to reassert the value of social, civic and economic encounter at street level. Today’s planners, architects and entrepreneurs stand on the shoulders of giants. They take for granted that urbanism happens at street level, and they view the interaction of building and street as a medium for creative experimentation. They are, on the whole, less concerned about height, mass and the skyline than the preceding generation. If human scale is honored, “density” and “high-rise” are not the dirty words they once were.
In the American city, a new and long-absent facility of the public realm has taken hold. Its geography is uneven, it fruits inequitably distributed, but from pop-up shops to graffiti walls to maker spaces, it is growing. We may well look back on this period as the time when the urban project stopped recovering from the 20th century and started inventing the 21st.