%Arabica Shanghai Jianguo West Road store

The site is on Jianguo West Road in Xuhui District, Shanghai. The 2,498-meter street, over ten meters wide and shaded by plane trees, has weathered historical change. What makes it one of Shanghai's most romantic streets is not only the historic buildings but the comfortable pedestrian scale. Unlike ordinary commercial streets that seal off interior space with closed curtain walls, Jianguo West Road has a vivid, open form where streets become places of human exchange, a thick urban interface. Buildings form towns; residents form cities. As the skeleton of the city, streets carry daily life and create livability. In a high-density, fast-paced modern city, streets need to return to human scale, offering comfort, richness and inclusiveness. Shimokitazawa in Tokyo, repeatedly voted a favorite neighborhood, puts furniture and displays out on the sidewalk, with people eating, drinking and gathering in the open. The % Arabica shop extends that open, generous street life, dissolving the boundary between cafe and sidewalk.