The convergence of recent social and political upheaval and the changing nature of the American (and global) city public realm has placed additional pressures on the urban retail ground-floor façade as a political and aesthetic staging ground for various social contestations. This article foregrounds several of these battlegrounds and provides historical context for the challenges and opportunities in reimagining the public realm and urban street of the future. The commercial enclosure has evolved into a vehicle for capitalist and consumerist demands, rooted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century material and technological advancements designed to achieve one thing: profits. Meanwhile, it is an increasingly politicized cultural symbol, set against a backdrop of tense economic disparities, racial tension, and changing consumer behavior. Amid the widespread social and political upheaval of 2019–2021 first seen in the United States following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, the nature of the building enclosure or façade has gone from a predominately apolitical envelope to one that asserts its political stance and vulnerability as both a target and symbol of institutionalized control. As products of a free market, the modern-day building façade and its attendant activities provide a new political and cultural context by which to understand and interrogate the evolving role of the building enclosure in contemporary society and culture. In three sections, I outline a framework for cohering the current conditions of urban storefronts in New York City and reorienting our perspective as to how these spaces and thresholds can be much more than a curated imaginary: 1) Against the Backdrop of a Movement, 2) The Domino Effect, and 3) Impending Shifts in Syntax / Economies of Change.

Against the Backdrop of a Movement

Globally and fundamentally, businesses seek to develop, grow, and control market share, the persistent criticality of thus progressing being an essential tenet of contemporary capitalism in its practice. As such, these businesses, of capital, commerce, communications, technology, and so on, operate as organizations of control, aiming to protect their investments and secure further advancement by whatever means necessary, the imperative always being to profit. Situations that do not bode well for this goal—for example, service and supply disruptions, boycotts, and general deceleration in economic activity—are to be avoided. Businesses may be said to achieve a form of sovereignty over a polity based on the extraterritorial control they therefore exert, projected from their privatized spaces onto the spaces of the public realm and urban street—spaces that in some remotely conceivable alternative might be programmed by and for citizens, untethered to capital.

In the interests of this rule of capitalism, the powerhouse industry of marketing came into being, to help drive sales, investments, and profits. From the 1950s to now, these marketing and advertising conglomerates, initially centered along New York City’s Madison Avenue, have honed their messaging to address society at large. One of the industry’s key messaging strategies has involved the identification of “target markets” of consumers or, in other words, the stratification of society based on those segments identified as customer, client, or citizen. Through this practice and through marketing agents, companies developed protocols by which to advertise consumer products from housewares to fashion, targeting specific demographics and subcategories of demographics with increasing precision to ensure the appropriate messaging reaches their preferred consumers.

Corporate executives and, more recently, economists have begun to question the generally accepted business model for marketing and advertising given the changing landscape in which consumers can attain information from a multitude of sources. Moreover, there has been a lack of empirical evidence to support advertising’s effectiveness.¹ The advertising industry continues to evolve and mutate, arriving on computer screens, mobile phones, and wearable devices. But from the 1950s through the late 1980s, prior to these platforms’ rise in prominence, the public space of the city was the industry’s preferred mode of consumer communication. 

Within this milieu, the grandiose ground-floor display windows of the urban department store became a secondary precursor to personal mobile device screens, following the television. The once-heralded window display spaces routinely underwent careful curation by window display designers, housing rotating installations that exhibited expansive scenes, from stagings of family vacations and dinner parties to museum-like presentations of electronics and housewares. “The old department stores embraced a business model that relied on spectacle and shopping as an experience.”² More importantly, these displays often conveyed social messages and commentary on status—on aspirational status, positioned status, or lack of status. While the public street offered a less scripted reality, the display window, a social messaging device transmitting well-honed advertising campaigns, cast a performative nature onto the space of the public street beyond so that they worked in tandem. The messaging’s express goal was to persuade, coerce, and position social and cultural norms via the simple participatory act of looking through the glass.

For those finding themselves clearly outside the depicted norms, or unable to access the advertised products and lifestyles, these scenes and displays were aspirational of a cultural assimilation not necessarily representative or desired. There are societal costs to the homogeneity with which the device of the display window has been used. In the most basic sense of pattern recognition, one can see an exclusivity and exclusion emerging therewith. The ever-growing divergences and disparities in the diverse lives of city dwellers, coupled with documented social and racial injustices taking place in the public spaces of cities, have offered a compelling contrast of worlds reflected by street-level display windows.

Not a neutral element within the urban landscape, the architectural envelope/enclosure and its semipublic urban street façade is, and historically has been, the first point of engagement between the public realm of sidewalks, streets, and citizens. In consonance with the arguments and observations of Jane Jacobs, who states, “Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities,”³ enclosures of public space and the building enclosures that frame them remain central to the argument that architecture mediates the relationships between people and place. In that mediation is where the codified communication and signaling of power dynamics, of agendas institutional, corporate, capitalist, and otherwise, reside. The syntax employed acts to either mediate or further constrain opportunities for greater social interaction and lessened exclusion in an already heavily stratified hierarchy of race and class.  

The public space of the city and therefore its canvas of building enclosures, acting as infrastructure for world economics, has seen its image grow increasingly entangled with the struggle for social equity and spatial justice. It is at once the context, as in a battleground, and simultaneously a morphing symbol, shifting under the oscillating transfers and redistributions of power, both local and global. Heightened scrutiny and countersurveillance in association with mounting tensions and public insecurity, intended to decipher ownership, belonging, and the social and cultural values assigned by competing interests, force a kind of public review of all symbols of power and control, including building enclosures. The modern architecture enclosure, particularly in the public realm of cities, communicates with the public through a range of thresholds encapsulating the intentionality of a given program and its occupants. This signaling ranges from the iconic features of the neoclassical and beaux arts and its association with enlightenment to the graphic iconography of logos and the visible transparency of corporate headquarters, transmitting global ascendancy with an economic imperative. The modern glass display enclosure advances this participation in the various social and cultural narratives imbued directly and indirectly throughout our built environment. 

The historical record of many US cities from the beginning of the 1960s squarely locates and makes discernible the ebbs and flows of certain pertinent social and political currents, the high point of these being the race riots that took place in US city streets from 1964 to 1968. Each of these left an indelible mark on our perception of the public space in our cities. Prior to these were the 1943 riots in Harlem, New York. However, it was the magnitude of the country’s 1960s race riots, a response to decades of politically, racially, and economically induced urban poverty, that recast cities as dangerous zones, containing unruly citizens deemed as requiring policing or forms of urban militarization⁴ and control for order to be maintained. Many of these practices not only continue to exist but remain the de facto tactics employed today. Law and order following this period has translated to policing, of the activities and behavior of the general public and of specific segments of the public, often defined by ethnicity, gender, and class. This patrolling of the public realm and, by extension, semipublic and commercial spaces, began with the reorganization of these spaces into arrangements allowing for the integration of different mechanisms of surveillance, first human and then technological. These practices are well documented with many accounts from individuals, primarily people of color, of being watched and followed in public, semipublic, and commercial environments. 

But surveillance was not enough to overcome the troubled image of cities and the public realm, nor did it instill a sense of freedom needed for members of desired market segments to engage fully in the sociocultural activities of leisure and commerce. What was needed was a seemingly innocuous agent to mediate between surveillance and reconnaissance, reconnaissance being a component of advertising and consumer research, which, coupled with surveillance, equated control. That agent in complicity was the modern building enclosure. The urban architectural envelope was now employed with multiple tasks, serving as souped-up threshold and becoming at once display, barrier, and harbinger of product and consumption. 

When considering the events that took place from 2019 through 2021—the swell in social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, police reform, and general political unrest associated with inequality and widening disparities in economic status, living, and well-being—it is significant to note that the backdrop for many of these events and the corresponding protests has been the public space of the urban street. Protest routes have navigated high-profile commercial corridors, whose street-level semipublic façades and building enclosures provided a stark contrast behind calls for social justice and the equitable distribution of health and wealth. 

The scenes of protest, both peaceful and violent, that played out before the entire country have featured a backdrop of expanding cities, which were previously the image of a vibrant and robust capitalism, the beneficiaries of a solidified global influence. Images portrayed thriving downtowns and gentrifying neighborhoods boasting new aesthetic formulas hollowly codifying notions of progress and change. These protest images quickly became a target of the unrest. Likewise, the enclosures standing tall in the background became a symbol representative of oppressive political and economic systems that have marshaled in or indirectly benefited from disparity. Associated with the full range of capitalism, the modern urban enclosure was now also antithetical to the social, racial, and economic justice ideals espoused by the protests. 

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protest movement, the response to a series of proverbial horror shows of injustice, was the opposite of the sanctioned public activities—of celebration of luxury or middle-class lifestyles and displays of well-appointed products and suggestive social norms—that had come to define this urban space. Meanwhile, standing idly by were the window displays of an indifferent, unaffected enterprise of commerce and capitalism—in its suspended animation appearing only momentarily interrupted. Its principal device, transparency, commodified whereby the visual display of commerce, operating at the highest thresholds of profit, serves as a kind of dog whistle of opposing values. Neither the enclosure nor its conjoined architecture, for the moment, are representative of values that could attract and incubate new progressive cultures and social arrangements without significant alteration, whether physical, social, or cultural, to the institutions manifesting it. 

Though the modern urban façade projects a veil of exclusivity and alienation, this was not always the case. It was not until 2010 that several US cities had undergone an impressive array of urban resurgence efforts and transformations that resulted in significant population growth.⁵ Unsurprisingly, many cities saw their transformations occur in alignment with strong and favorable economies. Old and new economies, including retail, technology, gig, and digital, attracted a new urban dweller termed “the creative class” by Richard Florida.⁶ This class represented a highly educated, social, and mobile workforce, of which the marketing sector took notice. Bolstered by the increased tax base of new residents, local governments invested heavily toward the improvement of public space, in turn attracting additional commerce. Cities also embarked on competitive advertising campaigns, seeking to attract the best and brightest new workers as residents, as well as the companies that employed them. Urban tensions ensued, but did anyone at the helm notice? Preexisting communities who were feeling the pressure of change or, plainly stated, gentrification, rallied late amid the speed and stealth of institutionalized investment and urban transformative processes. Their fight to slow down these transformations is ongoing. One thing, however, persists—the formidable recipe of a refined commercialized design aesthetic, of glass, transparency, expressive displays, and display interiors, meant to signify an environment receptive to the adjusted wealth, education, and mobility of target markets. These links, between the advancement of spatial advertising and its sponsor institutions’ deliberate coercion of the liminal space of the city, illustrate the dependency on public space as a surrogate actor in these practices of influence and control.  

Protesting institutions and systems of control, especially the opaque forces responsible for constructed urban environments and their related social dynamics, is an underpinning of one’s “right to the city,” best described by Henri LeFebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la Ville [The Right to the City].⁷ In it, he argues that the city can be viewed as a set of dynamic social constructs reflecting power dynamics, social relations, and economic forces—and that these constructs, political, capitalist, and institutional, which subjugate certain individuals to forms of exclusion and oppression, have a unique relationship to the built environment. First, they proudly preside over our cities in the form of districts, yards, headquarters, and retail centers, representing the physical nodes in a web of global multinational corporations and interests. And second, their sphere of influence on the value and aesthetic of the public realm of cities is unbounded. We live in these culturally and socially constructed environments that operate under a global influence. In an act of absolute self-interest, they also operate under a security complex that seeks to protect its investment and the future of economic development by obfuscating the underlying mechanisms that drive and support the forms of exploitation and inequality on which they rely. These range from unfair labor practices to the exploitative extraction of resources, economic displacement, and environmental degradation, to name a few.

Recognition of the intrinsic value of the building enclosure, by corporations, protestors, and the public alike, as more than simple building material but as social and political conveyor of ideals, has heightened tensions between each of these groups as they seek to communicate differing messaging. Protestors certainly saw commerce as a useful backdrop for conveying this contradiction of values, of equity and justice poised against profit, at the heart of the protests. The opposing values, which pitted the public against private corporations, at the very thresholds of enclosures where the two normally meet, became abundantly clear as ideological clashing escalated into destruction. The response was swift in what author Mike Davis effectively described a decade earlier as the militarization of urban space⁸ reacting to a perceived threat. The threat in this case was indeed real, as we saw factions and opportunists deface and destroy property, namely, building enclosures. This destruction of property, construed as a sign of escalated protest, has origins deep in American history. Violence as a reaction to non-white commercial success and its signifiers of property and status, perceived as having reached unacceptable levels and therefore requiring an authoritarian response, is best recorded in the destructive 1921 Greenwood District Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In this case, an entire town of African American homes and businesses were destroyed and martial law instituted—a display that signified opposition to racial tolerance and, equally importantly, to racial and economic independence. 

One thing that recent social justice movements have made exceedingly apparent is that no one and nothing is immune to social and cultural scrutiny or backlash. Norms and behaviors that exacerbated disparity and limited the advancement of social and spatial justice, once blindly accepted, have now come into question. In response to the public recognition of social, racial, and spatial injustice, fueled in part by the sheer speed and accessibility of social media, we have witnessed corporations and institutions issuing a stream of statements ranging from confessionals to professions of allegiance or condemnation. Some espouse support for change within the very systems that produced the oppressive, exploitative, and exclusionary norms that are suddenly widely considered socially unacceptable. The evident paradox in these statements affirms the difficulty in architectural design and practices with assuming a position of autonomy, indifference, or discontinuity with other cultural and social phenomena. The architectural envelope/enclosure, while functional, is also cultural material transmitting social values. If not within the envelope itself, then just beyond the looking glass lie further opportunities for cultural and social mediation.

The Domino Effect

From the removal of confederate monuments and slave owner statues, the renaming of streets, and publicized critiques of whose faces adorn advertising campaigns, to the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, the domino effect of inquiry into all forms of representation is a relatively recent force that directly confronts what and how we choose to communicate across a multitude of channels. These channels, ranging across commerce, media, arts, public space, architecture, and so on, are fertile ground for recodification towards ways that acknowledge the existence and value of a diversity of personhoods and views. However, when confronted with questions of land and property ownership structures, corporate image, and shareholder interest, a vast majority of the urban realm is inclined to operate within and understand itself through those lenses, the structure and inherent privatization of the city and public realm working in service of those organizations and institutions that control the land’s tenure. Lefebvre optimistically cautioned against this.⁹ In decisions concerning the value and use of urban land, there ostensibly must arise conflicting goals and ideals—those of an evolving society and those of a private client and the markets in which they operate, the servitude of public space included. This conflict heightens the significance of the design of architectural and spatial representation, while also inviting harsh scrutiny, as the architectural representation of the enclosure may be interpreted in terms of its representation of these clashing values and agendas. The potential of the architectural enclosure as a mediator, within public space especially, is better understood through its featured role in the nationwide protests. It is at this confluence that the crisis of the commons¹⁰ becomes apparent, highlighting an almost silent conflict over the resource of public space, its enclosures, how they are utilized, and for whom. 

Impending Shifts in Syntax / Economies of Change

From those demonstrations of social and political unrest, we can infer that with a greater sense of social mobility and equality come the increased normalization and perceived social acceptability of the activities of public and semipublic space. When the appearance of these conditions is systematically eroded or overtly threatened, those same spaces become easily politicized by class and race. Concurrently, the heavily relied-upon modern design syntax, at first corporate but now a universal symbol, produces such dominant and homogenous forms of expression of the semipublic envelope/enclosure that its representation all but reinforces current and historical social hierarchies and polarization. Public spaces and cities as well as retail and its customary storefronts have experienced sizable shifts in response to recent and ongoing social tensions and major disruptions to social, cultural, and working conditions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic—shifts that we have quickly grown accustomed to. They will undoubtedly continue to change, at the very least becoming more surveilled with the help of technology.

Another significant disrupter to the functioning of retail storefronts as spaces of engagement has been the arrival and impending dominance of the “experience economy.” A concept introduced by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in 1998, the experience economy does not seek to hawk goods ready for consumption and displayed through public-facing storefronts, nor does it close in traditional transactions within the physical space of the store. Rather, the experience economy invests in soliciting a customer’s or client’s attention toward branded experiences that may or may not involve a product in the traditional sense. This evolution is what Pine and Gilmore refer to as the “progression in economic value.” ¹¹ Particularly illustrative of this transformation is the luxury goods retail sector, where stores keep minimal physical inventory on-site. Inventory is now replaced by space, designed as a backdrop to engage customers and would-be clients to learn, share, and connect over an experience. In these cases, this sector has foregone the immediacy of a transactional exchange in favor of brand experiences, whereby the customer experiences meaningful interactions in the form of ideas, goals, and intentions. These more abstract offerings may subsequently be matched with an actual product, which is then presented, or more likely placed to order and delivered at the customer’s preferred address. Customization and personalization are front-and-center goals.

The selling of an experience is starkly different from the selling of a consumer good. For one, the means of communication of advertising are no longer grounded in or tied to the storefront. The industries leading in this sector tend to exhibit a more subdued presence not unlike that of “old money”—reserved and brumous or opaque, knowable only through introduction or prior association. This further shields the preferred clientele from unwanted public gaze or an unpredictable public sphere, ensuring that the experience remains between establishment and client, a highly valuable closed loop affording greater control. The universal transparency of the modern, of displays that belie actual offerings within, may cede to what has always been in semiprivate enclaves just beyond the public and that have always existed just beyond the looking glass. In this more contemporary version, the effect of the looking glass is renegotiated for new, more resonant material cultures.

The current reflection of commodified enclosures and hyper-branded public realm is without a counterpoint as antidote. The investment-minded and profit-branded public and semipublic realm is reified by the omnipresence of surveillance identifying outliers in the social pecking order. And although society portends equal opportunity, history has shown us that wealth and wealth creation is institutionalized in the same way that corporate globalization has institutionalized and monetized the building enclosure. If otherness ventures beyond the limits and thresholds of branded public space, then waiting on the other side is often further confinement in the form of social participation reinforcing unwanted governance and social boundaries, even if only implied. This pattern is not new, as Mike Davis noted, “Today’s upscale, pseudo-public spaces – sumptuary malls, office centers, culture acropolises, and so on – are full of invisible signs warning off the underclass ‘Other’.”¹²

Not unlike the original defensible space argument put forth by Oscar Newman in his 1973 publication Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design, whereby he argues that urban and spatial form, specifically that of housing, affects human behavior with respect to criminology.¹³  Following the work of Newman, Davis, Sorkin, and others, there lies a trajectory of cities evidenced in the work of these authors that tends toward increased privatization. First, privatization allows for further inroads in using the public realm as a canvas for hire; second, it gives rise to discrete methods of mediation and control meant to protect private and institutional investment; and, third, it completes the politicizing of space and the envelope.

In recognition of their symbolic and semiotic value, the marshaled defense of the quasi-public realm and envelope in the form of riot police and private security forces was enacted in such a highly public and coordinated manner during the unrest and protests that it spoke to the sheer power of institutions and market forces. Neither did the chosen method of defense, the plywood shield, go unnoticed, as it apparently trumped the previously desirable stealth of deterrence methods like CCTV and widespread surveillance systems. For the time being, these actions and reactions have inverted our normal associations of semipublic space and enclosures. What once constituted the highest value of engagement, messaging, and display has become a vulnerable threshold for mediation, opting for an opaque and economically determinant aesthetic, as conveyed by the newer experience economy, over any culturally or politically informed aesthetic. Additionally, any provocations of future aesthetics will likely correspond with economic opportunities within their host industry and market. The historic protests combined with the present vulnerability of this specific realm of enclosure might present an opportunity, however, to germinate new syntaxes capable of incubating ideas of spatial justice in line with the calls for social, racial, and economic justice—but only if the public realm can endure. 

Some may desire a return to normalcy or the vaguely familiar, as well as to design without political association. However, design and designers will only advance if and when they exercise a capacity to successfully interpret new sociocultural and anthropological meaning from market behaviors and to translate that understanding into new envelope regimes. Post-protest and post-COVID-19, the experience economy and inclusive-design agendas are poised to bear witness to architecture’s unfulfilled social responsibilities. It is yet to be seen whether the architectural discipline will or can rediscover ways to contribute authentically to diversifying and humanizing that which lies beyond the looking glass and in our shared existence in the city.

 _{1. Bradley T. Shapiro,  Günter J. Hitsch, and Anna E. Tuchman, TV Advertising Effectiveness and Profitability: Generalizable Results from 288 Brands, January 29, 2021 (PDF, Econometric Society). Researchers evaluate 288 brands to examine advertising effectiveness.}

 _{2. Stephen Eide, “Did the Golden Age of Department Stores Bring Us Together?” American Conservative, December 21, 2018, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/did-the-golden-age-of-department-stores-bring-us-together/.}

 _{3. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 30.}

_{4.  Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990), 223–31.}

_{5.  William H. Frey, “American Cities Show Uneven Growth, Over Last Decade,” Brookings, May 26, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-census-data-show-an-uneven-decade-of-growth-for-us-cities/.}

 _{6. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002).  Richard Florida identifies the emergence of a new social class reshaping the twenty-first century’s economy, geography, and workplace.}

_{7.  Henri LeFebvre, “The Right to the City,” chap. 14 in Writings on Cities, eds. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996). Lefebvre discusses the concept of the science of the city.}

_{8.  See Davis, “Fortress LA,” chap. 4 in City of Quartz.}

_{9. LeFebvre, “The Right to the City,” 154. Lefebvre describes a need for the questioning of established orders, including landed property and institutions.}

_{10. Jonathan Rowe, “The Parallel Economy of the Commons,” in State of the World 2008: Innovation for a Sustainable Development (London: Earthscan, 2008), 140. In a legal context, it is a type of property that is neither private nor public, but rather held jointly by the members of a community who govern access and use through social structures, traditions, or formal rules.}

_{11.  Joseph B. Pine and James E. Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” Harvard Business Review, 1998, https://hbr.org/1998/07/welcome-to-the-experience-economy.}

_{12.  Davis, City of Quartz, 226.}

_{13.  See Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (New York: Collier Books, 1973), especially x-x outlining the impacts of spatial form on human behavior.}