How Urban Communities Are Transforming Their Spaces for Work, Play, and Living
The pandemic brought devastation and disrupted our way of life. But it also made us pause to reconsider things from a different perspective.
As we faced limited options for moving around our cities and interacting with one another, we discovered new ways to work, play, and live. Some of these, it turns out, actually improved our quality of life. And some of these new trends are set to stay even as the world begins to re-open up and we work towards herd immunity.
Here are some of the trends we feel are set to stay even in the wake of Covid-19:
Rethinking mobility
As the pandemic limited our commute, it didn’t just save us time - it made us realize that it was still important to move. We took to our sidewalks and streets to walk, run, and bike - just to get our hearts pumping and fresh air in our lungs.
Experienced urban planners like Janette Sadik-Khan, principal at Bloomberg Associates and former commissioner of NYC DOT, believes that transportation is “at the heart” of the Covid-19 recovery for cities around the world.
In a column for FastCompany, Janette draws examples of how major cities everywhere, from Milan to Paris to London to American cities - have been announcing plans to extend sidewalks and bike lanes and create hundreds of miles of flexible streets that are not just designed for cars.
She wrote, “...our streets are really a lifeline, and not just a way to get cars from point A to point B. With all the traffic gone, you can see all the possibilities hidden in plain sight. We’ve had a car-centric orientation for generations now, and it actually doesn’t work. On many streets in New York City, 90% of the traffic is pedestrian, but they only get 10% of the street space. We can redesign our streets so there’s more room for people to walk in, more room for people to bike, and dedicated bus lanes.”
More pedestrian-friendly streets are not just key for our health and wellbeing - they are beneficial for the climate too.
Being together, safely
Covid-19 caused the world to realize what Asia realized since the SARS outbreak in 2003 - that dense urban spaces are breeding ground for viruses to spread. Not only that, cities were also centers of pollution and poor air quality. To combat the spread of viruses and filter out pollution, mask-wearing was already commonplace in many dense Asian cities.
The idea of protecting ourselves from airborne pathogens or polluted air has since spread beyond masks. In every country around the world, innovative ways for people to congregate, while staying safe, have popped up. These include:
Goldfish bowl-like acrylic screens that encircle patron’s heads as they interact in night clubs and restaurants;
Plexiglass dividers in between treadmills and machines in gyms and sports centers;
Drive-in open-air art performances where people can watch performances from behind their car windshields;
Bubble domes that allow individuals to dine in safety among other diners - or to take a group yoga class together; and many more!
These new ways of interacting in a shared space allow us to experience the magic of being together, close enough to see each other’s facial expressions without the lag of an unstable Zoom connection - while staying protected.
Better air quality
As we learned more about how the airborne Covid-19 pathogen spreads, especially through enclosed environments with poor ventilation and airflow, we realized how critical good air quality is.
Besides spreading disease, poor air can increase the risk of heart and respiratory diseases, as well as lung cancer. It’s also a major factor in causing asthma (or making it worse). As asthma rates among children are soaring around the world, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued clear warnings that we need to improve the quality of the air we breathe.
According to the EPA, indoor air quality can be 2 to 5X more polluted than outside air - due to poor ventilation and air circulation. This is why scientists who study air quality are demanding a “paradigm shift” in ventilation standards. Just like how many restaurants and public spaces are required to display their hygiene ratings, they argue for the public to demand greater transparency about an establishment’s ventilation.
According to Lidia Morawska, a physicist and an aerosol expert at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia who has advised the World Health Organization on the spread of airborne pathogens, we don’t really need to come up with new technologies to measure ventilation.
“The simplest (though perhaps over-simplistic) would be a display of CO2 concentration.... Either via handheld CO2 monitors or CO2 monitors mounted in a public, visible space,” she says. Such a monitor would showcase whether there are a lot of people breathing in this room and whether what they are exhaling is being cleared out quickly.
She adds that this concept is not new: “There are standards for CO2 concentrations, though in many buildings no one checks. But if it was mandated [to display CO2 concentrations in an indoor space] individuals could see the ventilation is bad.”
She also explains that this technology has been used in Germany for at least the last decade, if not longer, in schools. The CO2 meter also has a traffic light system: green, yellow, and red. The students and the teachers don’t have to look at what the concentration is, they see the color and immediately know what the air quality is.
Bringing nature closer
We’ve also realized how important nature is when faced with limited options to travel to exotic places. Many of us rediscovered our local parks, running trails, forests, beaches, and lakes, with fresh eyes.
And amid Zoom fatigue and combating the increased mental health challenges of living through a pandemic, we’ve realized the importance and therapeutic effect of nature.
Halvard Dalheim, Practitioner in Residence at The Henry Halloran Trust, University of Sydney, suggests that some ways urban planners might incorporate nature into everyday life includes “developing a lattice of widened nature strips” where people can walk, rest, and play, as well as “expanding urban tree cover and pocket parks”.
He also adds that “Better street lighting might be an important enabler for a walking community, not just a minimum provision for those who may dare to walk.”
Mixed-use developments
When every trip out of your home meant risking deadly pathogens, people thought twice about venturing out. But in the process, we’ve also gained efficiencies in how we make our grocery runs, and realized how much time we previously wasted in commuting.
Even after Covid-19, people are going to continue looking for options that save time and provide maximum convenience. This has escalated the trend towards mixed-use developments. Today’s buildings are more than just a shopping destination, or just a place to sleep.
While mixed-use developments have been on the rise for some time, pre-Covid-19 the main anchor tenants were usually retail or office spaces. As offices have adapted to remote and hybrid work, and retailers have shifted to a ‘brick and click’ model - suddenly, these options seem less attractive as anchor tenants.
Michael. Kaiser, Director of Design at The Beck Group, a Dallas-based integrated design-build firm and a member of multiple Associated General Contractors (AGC) chapters, believes that: “The most significant opportunity in mixed-use is focusing on the ways people prefer to live, work and play – now and in the years ahead. With this as the lens, medium-density residential is arguably the best anchor in today’s mixed-use environment because it is incumbent on the designers and developers to increase the amenities that mixed-use offers.”
The reason residential spaces can play a significant role in defining mixed-use buildings is because residential “blurs the lines of what it means to live, work and play in one place”. Today, people can choose to work fully or partially from home - so office and co-working spaces will complement the residential space.
In between, people will also seek out ‘third spaces’ for recreation. With residential as an anchor, the development can center around many of the other trends already mentioned above - such as open-air, green spaces, and flexible amenities that many people desire, such as gardens and terraces.
Co-working pockets in residential buildings
Last but not least, co-working is set to stay. With the efficiencies many people have gained once they adjusted to working from home during the pandemic, many don’t want to return to the way things were.
As many employers, especially in big tech, had already begun to offer flexible working arrangements, developers were already betting on co-working spaces built into amenity offerings.
These include conference rooms and private offices that residents can reserve, even if doing so means reducing the amount of recreational amenity space.
“Ten years ago, all these lounges were put into buildings for parties that never happened,” said Jeremy Brutus, co-founder of URBN Playground recently in the New York Times. “Now lounges are being used for work. It’s a shift in the way space in buildings is being used.”