Economic growth is usually analyzed at the national level.

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But when we look through the national lens, certain dynamics cannot reach our scope.

The big picture alone may give us an unbalanced view that understates the role of innovation, creative destruction, and other rapid and surprising changes that occur at the local level. Plans happen at the macro-level, but change often happens at the local level.

We live in city spaces that are constant negotiations between the planned order of things and the spontaneity of living. We benefit from planned streets and a planned water supply — but it is easy for too much prescriptive planning to stifle creative solutions, misallocate resources among individuals, and simply react too slowly to rapid change at the very micro-local level.

What if we included the local level in the history of development?

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The scope of this study is 486 feet of Greene Street between Prince and Houston Streets in New York City.

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133 Greene Street, for example, has been part of the large Bayard farm, a grand residential home, a brothel, a garment factory, part of a slum, an art gallery, and is today the home of luxury co-op residences and a Dior Homme store.

Many of these shifts took only a decade and could have been very difficult to anticipate.

Greene Street's story is not one of a smooth predictable trend -- when you look closely over a long range of time, there are spikes and dips, extreme booms and busts in the history of the block.