Yes, that is an interesting idea and I suspect there are many other creative ways to do some thing like that.

The plumbing remains a major problem, however. Restrooms and other plumbing are very centrally located in an office tower and the newer and more modern that office tower is the more central and consolidated they are.

Anything is possible, of course, but solving the light issue is just one item… The plumbing issue is at least as complicated.

Actually a really interesting idea. Not sure why we don't see this in major cities. Effectively this becomes a minimally with apartments. Do residents/businesses simply dislike this arrangement due to lack of foot traffic and noise?

I personally would love to live somewhere like that, but I don't see it working out in practice. For starters, discoverability for those interior businesses would be poor. Where would they put their names/signs?

I would look to the signage in Tokyo for an example. The buildings have columns of signs listing the floor each one is on. Definitely not what we're used to which might hurt adoption at first, but it works for them.

In the lobby, by the elevators. Offices generally don’t rely on walk-in traffic the way that retail or food/drink do.

The biggest challenge I see is in how to segregate commercial and residential traffic. Residents will not mostly want to live somewhere that they encounter random strangers walking through their hallways all the time. A purpose-built residential tower can limit access per floor fairly easily. In low-rise buildings with living area above retail, you segregate at the door to the upper floors.

Plumbing's been mentioned as an issue but I think ventilation would be an even bigger problem. The need to bring in fresh air and exhaust the cafe fumes from cooking, even with induction stoves, wasn't something that was probably planned for at all.

> Just fill the whole center of it with cafés, bodegas, computer repair shops—the kinds of small, locally-owned shops you get in a (healthy) small town or a pre-modern-zoning city area.

Cyberpunk 2077, here we come!