Market Street Reimagined

Market Street is San Francisco's civic spine, and one of the streets hit hardest by the pandemic, remote work and the hollowing of the downtown core. ULI San Francisco and the Civic Joy Fund opened an international ideas competition asking how a city core recovers under those conditions. Close to 180 anonymous entries arrived from nine countries, before a jury that included Norman Foster, Jony Ive and Janette Sadik-Khan.

UIO's entry does not begin by asking how to accommodate each new system competing for the street — delivery vehicles, micromobility, shared bikes, on-demand transport, eventually automated vehicles. It reverses the sequence. First define what the common urban plane is expected to produce: what ecological, social, infrastructural and public performance. Then assess which technologies and spatial configurations can contribute to it.

The work shifts the unit of urban design: from isolated objects to a continuous urban plane with material thickness and operational capacity. This is the idea PALO/UIO develops as ecological urban active surfaces (E-UAS).

The entry was not among the winners. It was subsequently developed as a theoretical case and published in Urbanistica Informazioni no. 329, the journal of Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, within the dossier Insieme nella transizione ecologica. That is the outcome we were after: the competition as research material, not as an end in itself.