Cities should do what they can to allow the smallest of interventions.

What I mean by this is that -- when it comes to our urban environment -- small and granular is usually a good thing. It's why our historic main streets tend to be better urban streets than the ones we are creating today from scratch. They were built at a time when cities were more compact and it was more feasible to build small. Now, intuitively, we know this to be true. It's why planners will encourage things like "fine-grained retail" and impose maximum areas for each CRU (commercial-retail unit). It's to try and recreate how things were done before.

But at the same time, we (as cities) also do lots of things that make it more difficult to go small. Every hurdle means that you need that much bigger of a project in order to make it worth while for a developer or small-business owner. Take for example Toronto's current debate over allowing small-scale retail shops in residential neighborhoods. This is a perfect place for smaller businesses. The rents should be lower than on any major street. But only if we don't erect too many barriers.

To this end, here's a project and coffee shop in Córdoba, Argentina that I have liked since it was completed back in 2021. Designed by Estudio Rare, which is one of ArchDaily's Best New Practices for this year, the building is situated on a triangular piece of leftover land created by its orthogonal neighbors. The resulting footprint is only about 4 square meters, which is somewhere around half the size of a typical Toronto condominium bedroom. So it's the kind of "site" that could have been easily forgotten and left to collect garbage. And yet, the architect, client, and operator made something work.

Here's the ground floor plan:

And here's a street view image from May 2024:

Now, I don't know what hurdles the project team had to jump through to build and operate this coffee shop. Maybe there were very few or maybe there were many. If any of you are from Argentina and familiar with the planning landscape, maybe you can let me know. But for the purposes of this post, it doesn't really matter. The simple point is that these kind of small-scale developments are a positive thing for cities. It doesn't matter that the footprint is only half the size of a small bedroom. It's a place to stop for coffee and a place to linger on the street with others.

Images via Estudio Rare

I recently asked this on Twitter:

You live in an apartment/condominium. If you could pick one ideal use/tenant for the ground floor of your building, what would it be?

And a number of people responded.

But I suppose I should also answer my own question.

I lean more towards utility. My ideal use -- assuming an urban storefront -- is not a fancy restaurant or a super cool coffee shop. It would be some sort of quality bodega that:

• Sells essential grocery needs (milk, eggs, toilet paper, etc.)

• Sells wine & beer

• Has a deli/food counter where you can buy a breakfast bagel, a sandwich for lunch, or a quick dinner when you're in a pinch

• And, yes, has pretty good coffee

It would also need to be open early and late: 7am to 12am, please.

What would you want?

There was a good discussion on Twitter this morning about small-scale commercial uses in residential neighborhoods, like the coffee shop shown above on Shaw Street. In most residential neighborhoods in Toronto, this kind of commercial activity is not permitted if you were to try and initiate it today. The small convenience stores and bodegas that remain are often legal non-conforming uses. And while generally considered desirable in their current confirm, if you were to try and make a change, you could get caught in some municipal red tape where your grandfathered status suddenly no longer applies.

That is exactly what happened in the case of the above coffee shop and, from the discussions that happened on Twitter this morning, it is a problem that is not unique to Toronto. Alex Bozikovic wrote about this coffee shop and this project in the Globe and Mail over seven years ago. Getting it approved and built was no easy task. And my friend Jeremiah Shamess -- who renovated a similar and formerly commercial corner building in the area -- ran into the exact same challenges.

But let's consider the other side of this argument for a minute. It's easy to look at a great and well-designed neighborhood coffee shop like this one and say to yourself that it is obviously a desirable use and that we should be encouraging more of them in our residential neighborhoods. But what if it was a noisy late-night bar, a nail salon, or a massage parlor? Would your opinion change? Would it change if you were an immediate neighbor? It is perhaps easy to see why the fear of the things we don't want has led us to sterilize our neighborhoods to the point where we no longer allow the things that we may in fact want.

And herein lies the immense frustration that many of us have with our land use policies. There are countless examples of obviously desirable uses and built forms that are exceedingly difficult to execute on because of the barriers that we ourselves have put in place. Whether it's a cool neighborhood coffee shop or new affordable housing, there are far too many examples of these sorts of projects being stuck in some kind of planning ether -- sometimes for decades. We say and know that we want these things, but then it is frequently the case that we can't get out of the way so that they can actually happen.