You Should Become the Shopkeeper

When you walk down the street, within your visual field are two primary kinds of building frontage: homes and businesses. On this street, all the residences within view are inaccessible. You cannot, reasonably, enter them. You can see the apartment, but it affords you no action.

And then there are storefronts. Their doors are left unlocked. The storefronts are porous; in the city, they make up our collective field of action. ¹

Activity takes place elsewhere in the city of course, but only after you have a particular role or relation.

In the office, you are to be an employee.

In the school, you are to be a student.

in the home, you are a friend of the inhabitant.

It’s not only about access. A park is also at ground level and open to all. So is a street. But these spaces, by design, leave your activity somewhat undetermined.

A storefront asks something of you. It structures action, establishes expected behavior and, historically at least, requires interaction. Walking down the street, it is the storefronts that whisper to you about the possible life you could live. Its potential public is the neighborhood, not a curated group.

Cities share their own messages². So do neighborhoods. But, at the scale of streets – arguably, the most important unit of analysis for the city – storefronts exert the strongest influence on how life plays out.

This is part of what makes the storefront such an unusual social technology: it combines openness with structure. It can organize encounters among people whose primary thing in common may simply be that they live in the same area.

And because that commonality is geographic, the effects of the encounter extend beyond the storefront. You may have passed someone a hundred times without so much as a hello, but after a one interaction, every future passby holds the possibility and significance of recognition,

We stay longer in place where we know others and are known ourselves. When we intend to stay longer, we invest more in the place around us. When we notice something is wrong in the commons, we are more likely to address it. The roots of our belonging, and our civics, is our relationships.

The structure through which the storefront produces these relationships is the social form.

Social Forms Toby Shorin’s piece Theory of Social Forms and Prototyping Social Forms of Care introduced the language of social forms to me, and I think its useful frame.

Shorin describes them as “the structured architectures of behavior that determine the shape of social situations,” or as “the templates of social life.”

They are the arrangements of people, roles, activity, place, and time that give a social situation its shape.

Much of our life takes place within forms we rarely notice as forms: restaurants, classrooms, dinner parties, meetings, religious service, and so on.

These forms structure the majority of our lives.

I am especially interested in the subset that occupy urban ground-floor commercial spaces. They are unusually visible, porous, and replicable. They address a whole neighborhood, not a pre-selected and later insular group ³

Invented Forms Yet, we mistakenly take these forms to be fixed categories of the built environment. Instead, they are inventions. Each emerged under unique spatial, cultural, and historical conditions, and then became legible, templatized, and fixed in the urban imagination ⁴.

It’s easy to confuse familiar forms as inevitable forms. The modern restaurant is only a few centuries old, emerging in the 18th century in Paris ⁵. Other variations, like the fast-casual slopbowl, have emerged much more recently.

Walk into any storefront where you live, and you probably have an astonishingly detailed model of how you should exist within it.

Travel to another country, or even another city, and you enter locally specific forms that asks you to behave in unfamiliar ways. You have no model for the form. Soon, you learn the rules, expected conduct and norms; you become a person who acts a certain way ⁶.

Forms make particular patterns of behavior ordinary. Repeated across our lives, across many people, these patterns arrange and define society itself.

Social Forms are Economic Forms Yet, a social form can only exist and proliferate if an economic form sustains it. The social possibilities of a storefront are bounded, and defined, by how it makes money.

Let’s take two quite simple but illustrative examples: the bar and the cafe.

At the bar, a person can occupy their seat for several hours because the economic form supports lingering. Drinks are very high margin, and people often purchase several over an evening. This allowance of lingering makes possible a particular social form.

At the cafe, the drink is now a fraction of the cost of the cocktail, and a customer isn’t buying successive drinks. So, the cafe introduces uncomfortable chairs, imposes a 90-min wifi control, and covers the the outlets.

Economic forms are social forms, and vice versa.

An experiment in social form without a functioning economic form will be short-lived. The best forms find alignment beyond reconciliation: economic and social activity productively reinforce one another.

Scale If economic viability is what allows it to exist, legibility is what allows it to scale.

This invention starts with a single storefront. That storefront establishes new arrangements of space, staffing, ritual, economics, rules of engagement, and the like.

The aim is not to scale that particular storefront.

Instead, the aim is to make legible the abstracted form – the social form, economic form, and operating form – so that it may then be remixed by operators to fit their personhood, their street and their community.

This a theory of distributed change, rather than centralized expansion. It scales through the bottom-up work of future shopkeepers. It avoids central top-down planning, as is too common in new urban developments, and brings something to the people ⁷.

And it what’s happened to most of the forms we have now. They started as one establishment doing something different. They were copied and modified, and eventually entered the library of forms that future shopkeepers selected from.

Consider the now remarkably ordinary fast-casual bowl restaurant. An operator does not have to invent the form from first principles. Customers know where to stand and how to order. You can hire employees that have already worked in similar establishments. The staffing model, spatial arrangement, unit economics, and service conventions are understood. There is an existing form to draw from.

A new social form begins without any of this. Customers, employees, and operators alike don’t have a guide.

So invention alone is insufficient. A new form must be demonstrated, abstracted from the particular establishment that produced it, made legible, remixed and then absorbed into the default conventions of customers, workers, and shopkeepers.

At maturity, no one person or company upholds the form. They are simply drawn on, and moved through, like language itself.

So, where are the new forms?

Today’s forms don’t seem to be working that well. The inherited forms appear increasingly mismatched to the lives we want and the economics required to sustain them.

More, the forms most capable of reproducing under the prevailing storefront economics are faceless, sterile corporate ones. We should not so lightly cede our primary field of action – which we should wish to be shaped by humans – to placeless establishments whose incentives have little to do with the quality and shape of our neighborly encounters.

Clearly, people want something more. The renewed interest in the “third place” evidences this want for spaces that address urban isolation, weakened institutions, and the desire to belong. But too often operators engage with the aesthetics of belonging without a new social form: another cafe-ish room, with a language of care, while the underlying rules, economics, and patterns of interaction remain unchanged. I think the “third place” has become the catch-all aspiration precisely because we lack the vocabulary for more differentiated forms.

If the presiding forms aren’t creating patterns of urban activity that contribute to human flourishing, we have to invent new ones.

This seems to me particularly good (and important) time to take seriously this work.

First, AI and rapid technological change will be destabilizing. This is true in both the optimistic and pessimistic account of things.

In such a world, our civic health – neighborliness, systems of mutual reliance, informal surveillance, coordination capacity, collective action, local knowledge, and trust in local governance – becomes far more important.

The resiliency of local networks is the appropriate foil to global instability.

As already discussed, storefronts (especially pro-social forms of the storefront) play an irreplaceable role in developing of urban civics. The ground floor is where our common social life and civic capacity is organized

Now, let’s suppose things go well, and we’re ushered into an age of abundance.

For most of urban history, cities were organized around labor markets. Work established a setting for repeated contact with the same people and place, with roles and status, weak ties, shared projects, and reasons to leave the house. Work also organized the city spatially, with residential neighborhoods and patterns of commutation to commercial districts.

If work organizes less of life, I think we can anticipate that where we live will organize more of it.

Instead of our time being organized by the employer, it will fall on us. New, and old, social forms will have to take on more of the burden of civilizational health, including that which work provided for us.

Simultaneously, we’re eliminating the economic inefficiencies of human interaction in the city: autonomous vehicles, self-checkout, order kiosks, and so on. Historically, urban interaction was often incidental. The frictions of commerce have us interacting with the cashier, and the frictions of navigation had us asking for directional help ⁸.

As those incidental encounters disappear, the forms that remain will increasingly need explicit social design.

When AI personalizes everything to the individual – personal assistant, personal tutor, personal shopper, personal writer, personal driver – the commons now becomes scarce.

The neighborhood is where we develop this shared reality.

If our cities don’t draw the individual into a rich and meaningful social life, abundant leisure time may be captured by solitary entertainment. The ground-level, and the institutions which make it up, will have to support the activities of the commons: eating together, learning together, building together, worshipping together, or simply being in the presence of others.

We can even imagine post-transactional or post-retail storefronts: places whose primary purpose is no longer commerce, but instead sociality or something else ⁹

In all versions of the future, the ground-level becomes much more important, not less.

So here is my invitation: become the shopkeeper.

Start one, fund one, or build tools for one.

You don’t need a master city plan to change urban life.

Shopkeepers are operators, institution builders, researchers, social architects, and civic leaders working at the smallest scale at which urban life can be repeatedly rearranged and reworked.

If you are ambitious and wish to be enmeshed in your neighborhood, work at the scale of a street and contribute to forms that when scaled shape a nation.

Footnotes