The original note, as written at the time
You don’t need views when all you want to look at are products. We can bury all those shopping, private and mass transportation and AC dependent functions deep underground, so that the surface is left for beauty and reflection.
Ongoing development
You do not need views when all you want to look at are products.
That one line has been sitting with me because it reframes the entire argument about what goes where. We treat the surface of the city as though everything must compete for it, and then we are surprised when the result is a street where retail, parking, delivery, air conditioning plant and pedestrians are all fighting over the same four metres. But most of that does not need to be seen. Most of it, honestly, would prefer not to be seen.
So bury it. The shopping. The private transport. The mass transit. The air conditioning plant and all the machinery that keeps a modern building alive and makes a modern street impossible to sit in. Put it under, in a continuous engineered layer, and leave the surface for the two things that genuinely require daylight: beauty and reflection.
I am not proposing a tunnel here and there. I mean the deliberate stratification of the city, where the underground is designed as seriously as the ground, with its own logic, its own air, its own light wells and its own exits, and the surface becomes a place shaped by what people want rather than by what vehicles and services require.
There is a cost argument and I am not going to pretend it away — underground work is expensive per cubic metre and unforgiving of error. But we already pay for that underground, we simply pay for it badly, in fragmented basements and incidental service trenches and car parks that surface as dead frontage at every opportunity. Concentrating it is not a new expense. It is the same expense arranged so that it buys something.
And there is a social argument that matters more. A surface given over to beauty and reflection is a surface that belongs to people who are not buying anything. Right now, every square metre of our public realm is quietly sponsored by somebody’s commercial requirement, and the person who has no commercial requirement — the old man, the child, the woman waiting — has nowhere that was not designed for someone else’s transaction. Burying the transaction is how you give the city back to the people who are not transacting, without pretending that commerce has gone away.
The engineering will take a generation and the politics will take longer. But the principle is simple enough to hold on to: if what is above is only for looking at, then what is below had better be designed properly.