If I were to tell you a drug dealer had recently colonized a popular street corner, thereby precluding all civic life around it, that would sound like a familiar scenario, conjuring visions from crime dramas like The Wire.

But what if the drug dealer in question wasn't some low-rent street pusher, but one of America's largest corporations, and what if it was operating not just in some impoverished neighborhood most of us don't visit, but all across the city?

What if that dealer was CVS?

Now I know what you're thinking. You probably like CVS. I like CVS, too. I shop at CVS. Shopping at CVS is increasingly unavoidable because CVS is America's most ubiquitous pharmacy, with nearly 10,000 stores nationwide. On one short stretch of Lemmon Avenue, there are three CVS stores.

If you're like me, you shop at CVS not just because it is convenient and the service is generally excellent, but because its stores are a lot nicer than those of its chain competitors. The success of CVS is a story about the power of design, both for good and for ill.

Clockwise from top left: CVS stores located at 108 West Davis St., 3030 Sylvan Ave., 3133 E. Lemmon Ave. and 4930 Maple Ave. in Dallas on Wednesday, June 13. (Jae S. Lee / Staff Photographer)

Inside a CVS it's bright and quiet. There's gray carpeting — no cold linoleum flooring — and the aisles are comfortably wide. Shelves are at shoulder height so there's good visibility across the store and you don't have to reach above your head for items. Large wall panels, typically in pastel colors —blue, red, yellow — mark out departments, and the aisles themselves are clearly labeled. Pharmacists stand at your level behind a waist-high counter, not elevated imperiously above you so they look down as if from the fortified walls of a citadel.

The aesthetic standards are not inspiring, but inoffensively bland. This is a rather low bar for praise, but that is itself an indictment of the poor state of design among CVS' chain competitors. The days of the old independent neighborhood pharmacy, with bespoke wooden cabinets stocked by a benevolent pharmacist who owns the store, are now mostly gone, another victim of the corporatization of American retail culture and the health care industry.

As beneficent as that design might appear, it is also manipulative. To get to the pharmaceuticals that are intended to heal us — always in the rearmost aisles —CVS marches you past aisles packed with all manner of food and drinks that are categorically bad for your health. Last year, in acknowledgment of this bit of hypocrisy, CVS heralded a "new store design" that would "enhance the retail customer experience with a new assortment of healthier food." That's well and good, but the junk foods are still there.

The interior design is manipulative, but the exteriors are worse, for they actively encourage unhealthy behavior by abetting an auto-centric lifestyle and making the city actively worse for anyone who would prefer or requires other means of mobility, above all walking.

CVS achieves this, first and foremost, by occupying prime locations, often at prominent intersections, and then placing their stores well back from the street behind parking lots. That's a signal to those driving by that there's convenient room to pull in, but for anyone walking by it's restrictive and unappealing.

A most egregious example of this is the recently constructed Bishop Arts store on the corner of Zang Boulevard and West Davis Street. New developments were coming in on the other three corners of this intersection, which gave CVS a perfect opportunity to activate this street by placing their store prominently on the corner, with parking at the rear. Instead it did the opposite, sinking the store well back from the street behind a wide lot.

But even when CVS stores are better integrated into the urban fabric, their wan architecture degrades the civic space. At its essence, a CVS is a boring unadorned box, often without windows or with windows that are shaded, offering nothing to the passerby. It is almost always faced by some combination of brick and beige stucco. A typical entry is of a bastardized classical language entirely of CVS' invention: recessed at a curved corner, between two brick piers and beneath an overhanging faux-truss that looks like a warped ladder turned on its side. It is a meaningless gesture, a futile attempt to put lipstick on an architectural pig.

Together, these elements suggest a kind of half-hearted nod at traditional contextual design, though in practice CVS is context agnostic: A CVS looks like a CVS no matter where it is. It is a structure without character or distinction, and to walk along such a building is an unpleasant experience that degrades pedestrian life, the civic space and all the other properties around it.

As a CVS customer, I would like to see the company do a better job of embracing the city on which it depends. Yes, there are locations that will have to cater to a driving population, and that's fine. But in areas where there is a growing pedestrianism, where the city is discovering a new walkability, it needs to rethink its designs.

But it is not just up to CVS. It is incumbent on planners and representatives to develop and enforce codes that preclude urban malpractice by chain retailers.

Call it first aid for the city.

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News, a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Architecture.