COVID-19 HAS SHOWN WE ALL NEED PUBLIC

SPACE MORE THAN EVER

COM M UNITIES / ARTICLE

PUBLISHED SEPTEM BER 29, 2020 BY JOHN GENDALL

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Successful cities will find new ways to design spaces

everyone can access, Knight Public Spaces Fellows say

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended basic assumptions that have

long anchored just about every facet of society, from home and family
to work and politics. It’s also brought into question the balance between
private and public space, and the very definition of just what “public” is.

Last year, Knight Foundation inaugurated the Knight Foundation Public

Spaces Fellowship. The seven fellows come from diverse backgrounds
and have different professional engagements with public space, but
each has in common a longstanding professional commitment to the
creation and improvement of public space.
As COVID-19 tears through communities across the U.S. and around
the world, it has highlighted the critical role of public space as an
essential parameter of public health, and it has brought into sharp relief
the systemic inequity of access to public space. In their own ways, each
of the seven fellows has been tackling this inequity, calling for and
making public space accessible in fairer ways.

“We know public space is an essential part of mental health, public

health and economic stability, so this one thing — public space — would
make the disparities of equity during this pandemic less stark,”
says Chelina Odbert, executive director of Kounkuey Design Initiative
(KDI). “This is not the time for a 10- or 20-year plan,” she adds. “We
need to treat this with urgency.”

To make new parks, cities spend years, sometimes decades, building

consensus, allocating budgets, procuring teams, making designs, and
administering construction. Now, faced with an immediate public health
need and urgent demand for outdoor space that allows for safe physical
distancing, that project delivery pipeline has become unacceptably slow.

“If public spaces go through the traditional track, they won’t rise to this
occasion,” warns Odbert. “We need new financing strategies, new
physical forms of public space, new design and decision-making
processes, which will take political will, strong leadership, optimism and
a belief in the possible instead of a commitment to the status quo.”
 Konkuey Design Initiative recently released a toolkit for
adapted public space that facilitates safe, touch-free outdoor
play. Illustration by Konkuey Design Initiative.

As the commissioner of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation,Kathryn Ott

Lovell is doing just that. Invoking the department’s history as part of the
city’s Department of Welfare, she has retooled her approach to deliver
immediate relief with recreation and public space. “For 57 years,” she
explains, “the department has had a Playstreets program, closing off
streets and delivering meals to community members.” Along with the
meals comes a duffel bag filled with recreational items — hula hoops,
bubbles and jump ropes. “When we were thinking about how best to
address the COVID-19 crisis, we thought, ‘let’s put all our eggs in the
Playstreets basket this summer.’”

Because of the neighborhood-based nature of the program, the

approach limits transportation between home and park, and it keeps
density low, making it an ideal shared experience in a time of physical
distancing. Design consultants, including KDI, have contributed modular
and adaptable play equipment. “If kids can’t come to us,” Ott Lovell
says, “then it’s our moral responsibility to get to the kids.”

Oakland-based landscape architect Walter Hood shares this sense of

urgency and willingness to innovate. Recognizing that arts- and
performance-based groups face immense challenges as a result of the
pandemic, he reached out to the City of Oakland on behalf of a local
nonprofit dance organization. He proposed converting a neighborhood
street into one of Oakland’s Slow Streets, transforming it into a venue for
dance rehearsal and performance, and, in so doing, creating a novel
type of public space.

In his personal life, as a resident of Oakland, he also took it upon

himself to plant a series of trees on the sidewalk alongside his studio.
This action had the effect of creating a sense of space. “People stop
along the sidewalk now,” he says, referring to the sense of place and
shade the trees now provide. An example of what he has defined as
“hybrid landscapes,” the plantings are neither public (as a matter of
contract and project delivery) nor entirely private (in the sense of being
restricted to him). Instead, they provide shaded area to be shared by his
community.

One of the consistent themes that has emerged about public space in
the context of COVID-19 is a sense that public space need not be
permanently fixed to a particular locality. Rather than something drawn in
ink onto a static city map, it can move and evolve over time, like
Philadelphia’s Playstreets or Oakland’s Slow Streets. This is an
approach to public space-making also taken by Erin Salazar, the
executive director of Local Color, an arts organization in San Jose,
California. The group, which commissions artists to produce work in the
public domain, is launching a new program that will provide funding for
local artists to paint local storefront windows. This will not only provide
artists with much-needed work, but it will also create an outdoor self-
guided arts walk, drawing residents to local business and into a shared
experience on the sidewalks.

“This pandemic has made everyone afraid of so many things, and,

unfortunately, a fear of each other is one of those things,” says Salazar.
“This project will bring the community outdoors, and people will be able
to see human beings making art and appreciating art.”

More than the designation of a place as public, this sense of shared

experience — of people in a place together — has come to so clearly
define “public space” through this pandemic. Take New York City’s High
Line, for example. Because it is technically coded as a building, and
because its narrow dimensions made physical distancing effectively
impossible, it was forced to temporarily close during the height of the
pandemic.Robert Hammond, the High Line’s executive director, was
able to stroll part of the landscape during the closure. “Without people,”
he says, “it felt so melancholy. It was missing the key ingredient.” Now,
as the High Line reopens for timed and ticketed visits, it has begun to
reestablish the essential element — people sharing public space — that
has made it such a landmark.

The High Line, 2020. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy of

the High Line.

This simple act of seeing other people, of sharing space with others, is
a fundamental part of the human experience. By limiting that physical
connectedness, COVID-19 has reinforced — loudly so — the
importance of that social experience. For Anuj Gupta, the former
general manager of Reading Terminal Market, a public market in
Philadelphia, public space will be a much-needed and necessary tonic
to months of physical distancing. “This pandemic has been a trauma to
the community at large, and public space is a way to heal it,” he says.
“Human beings are inherently social, and we are retreating further and
further into our silos,” he cautions, citing the move toward digital
communication that the pandemic has accelerated. “Public spaces are
one of the few spaces that still offer the opportunity to engage in social
behavior.”

For those who have ready access to it, public space, like other forms of
infrastructure and public services, can seem something of a given. The
pandemic, though, has brought newfound scrutiny to public space,
highlighting its value in public health and laying bare inequities of
access. “One thing about this moment is that we’re starting to see just
how important it is to use and have public space,” says Eric
Klinenberg, NYU’s Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science
and the author ofPalaces for the People.

“I got really interested in how public spaces are morphing and

transforming during this COVID crisis,” says Klinenberg. “A number of
libraries, for example, have effectively unfolded, moving services
outdoors, and moving librarians to other spaces, finding new ways for
people to access the library even though the building itself was closed.”

As municipalities and communities set out to create and update public

space to meet new demand and emerging public health parameters,
Klinenberg urges a long-term view. “One of the challenges of the
moment is trying to balance the short-term needs with long-term
planning considerations,” he explains. “One concern I have is that cities
and states will make exceedingly short-term decisions about building for
distance because COVID is on our minds. By the time such projects are
completed, we’ll have made our communities more isolating and
atomizing,” warns Klinenberg.
As Ott Lovell considers how to deliver public space in Philadelphia, she,
too, recognizes the relative time horizons. “We are dealing with a
pandemic, and I’m hopeful that it’s a snapshot in time — that we are not
going to have to fundamentally change how we design public space in
the future.”

For her, as for all the fellows, public space is one of the last venues for
diverse, spontaneous shared experience, which makes protecting it
imperative to civic engagement and the democratic experience.

“Everything we interact with is about how we want to interact with it. We

don’t have to go to a bar to date, we don’t have to go to a grocery store
to buy food, and we are handed Facebook feeds and Netflix queues,”
she says. “Public space gives us this unique opportunity to interact with
people we didn’t pre-select or choose, so a time like this shows us how
critical it is that public spaces are truly public.”

You can learn more about the Knight Public Spaces Fellows by watching
these recent episodes of “Coast To Coast,” where Knight program
director Lilly Weinberg interviewed several of the fellows:

Episode 1: How Can We Rebuild Our Cities? with Eric Klinenberg

Episode 3: Rebuilding With New Models for Public Space

Engagement with Kathryn Ott Lovell and Robert Hammond

Episode 4: Taking Back Our Streets During COVID-19with Chelina

Odbert

Episode 10: Building Equitable Public Spaces with Walter Hood