In How to Design a Post-Pandemic City on the Bloomberg CityLab blog, Alex Wittenberg writes: “…there’s a broad need to reimagine public space and devise socially distanced ways to navigate the urban landscape over a longer term…outdoor space will need to work even harder — hosting stores, performances, and all manner of public services.
A new effort focused on Baltimore is offering a set of solutions to public space challenges during the pandemic. The “Design for Distancing Ideas Guidebook” — a free document from the city of Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Baltimore Development Corporation, and the city’s nonprofit Neighborhood Design Center — collects 10 plans for creating temporary, low-cost spaces that permit physically distant social interaction in urban environments such as streets, alleys, vacant land and parking lots. The selected concepts were drawn from a pool of 162 submissions from architecture and design firms; the plans were conceived around the needs of Baltimore’s neighborhoods, but could be adapted to cities anywhere.”
“These aren’t just design exercises: The winning interventions, which should cost between $5,000 and $100,000 each to construct, are set to be installed in 17 neighborhoods across Baltimore, supported by a $1.5 million investment from the city during the second phase of the project. The hope, project leaders say, is that they can also help channel resources into priority districts in low-income communities. Most of the 17 neighborhoods selected, Goold said, are in neighborhoods in East and West Baltimore that have suffered from chronic disinvestment. These aren’t gentrified districts that are currently full of restaurants and retailers: Oldtown, for example, has one of the highest vacant-lot densities among Baltimore’s neighborhoods; it’s now home to a long-vacant pedestrian mall.”
“This guidebook talks about how we can have principles that prioritize communities of color and communities that have been disinvested,” Pollack Porter said. “It is a tremendous opportunity to center equity and public health in how we rethink public spaces.”