ICYMI: The Recovery Will (Still) Happen in Public Space

More from the Blog

Essential Places: Warren Logan on Open Streets Beyond Brunch and Bike Lanes
June 26, 2020 • an interview with Warren Logan by Nate Storring

Equitable Development During and After COVID-19: Five Takeaways
June 12, 2020 • by Nate Storring

Black Lives Matter
June 1, 2020

A Placemaker's Perspective from Wuhan
May 29, 2020 • an interview with Zheng Yue (郑玥) 
 

More Events & Opportunities

Webinar, July 16: Exploring Urban Excellence: Sustaining Vibrant Urban Places in an Era of Social Distancing, Rudy Bruner Award (featuring PPS board member Kimberly Driggins)

Webinar, July 22: Plaza Talk: Race and Place, PlacemakingUS

Missed any of our webinars on COVID-19 and public space? Watch the videos on our Events page.
 

From Reopening to Reclosing: American public officials that were eager to “reopen the economy” are reconsidering their plans as coronavirus cases surge, particularly in the Sunbelt (Bloomberg Cities). As new data collected by the New York Times also reveals, the impact continues to disproportionately fall on people of color, including a steadily growing proportion of Latinos (New York Times). 

Our understanding of the virus has also continued to grow. A handful of people infected seem to act as “super-spreaders” of the virus, and it likely has more to do with their crowded living and working conditions than their biology (New York Times). A growing number of scientists argue that the virus is airborne, and can float around a poorly ventilated indoor space for hours (New York Times). Mask-wearing remains an important tool to prevent infecting both strangers and loved ones (Boston Globe). Once again, all signs point to the relative safety of outdoor public spaces.

But the true question is whether there is political will to work with the people closest to the problem to apply this knowledge consistently and fairly.

Reimagining District Management: Matt Bergheiser, President of University City District in Philadelphia, reflects on how business improvement districts (BIDs) have been complicit in histories of gentrification, incarceration, and exclusion, and grapples with how organizations like his own might better align equity with economic growth (Public Square).

Bergheiser argues that to meet the moment, BIDs need to reconsider how they can actively build Black wealth through strategies like hiring and procurement programs, pathways to leadership, and an equitable approach to placemaking.

The Ethics of Care: Effective placemaking requires ongoing maintenance, management, cultivation, and human interaction—in a word, care. But as urban geographer Leslie Kern argues in her new book, Feminist City, the foundational work of caregivers is so often devalued in our cities (Curbed). So what would an alternative look like?

“It has to be a city that prioritizes how people get their basic needs met,” says Kern. “If we thought of those sorts of things first and then layer on top of that economic question of production and consumption, what would that change in the way that we organize our built environments and the way that we move through them? Could we create some kind of order so that care isn’t just an afterthought to a primary need to produce things?”

Messy New Uses in Public Space: The City of New York has implemented open streets programs and outdoor dining, but the vast majority of public spaces in the city have been left to their own devices to adapt to the pandemic (New York Times). The city's many plazas have removed some of their seating. In Bryant Park, drinking fountains have become hand-washing stations. In Long Island City, property owners are letting tenants use private parking lots for outdoor restaurant seating. Even the usually tourist-crammed High Line has begun to serve a larger proportion of locals, which was ironically part of the original vision for the space (Washington Post).

But with so much changing so quickly, some are raising questions about how to balance outdoor private uses with fair access to public space, particularly for anyone who business owners might see as “disrupting” their business (CityLab). After all, the recent wave of protests against racial injustice are intended to be disruptive, but we should recognize that protests, too, are a particularly important kind of placemaking (StreetsBlog Chicago). As Olivia Grenzebach argues, “This placemaking comes from tragedy and pain. But it is placemaking. People are together. People have made this public space their own, what they want it to be.”

Placemaking Playbook: Finally, here's a roundup of 13 recent innovative placemaking ideas and projects making headlines:

1. Community fridges in New York that fight food insecurity, reduce waste, and unite neighbors (The Cut)
2. One guy's quest to catalog house numbers on all 1,114 blocks of his Arlington, VA, neighborhood (Slate)
3. That healing jazz thing on a porch in Brooklyn, NY (New York Times)
4. A program for teens to teach cops new ways of interacting in Portland, OR (Next City)
5. New data on police killings and race (Public Discourse)
6. The resurrection of Tulsa's Black Wall Street through hip hop (CityLab)
7. A brief history of the ice cream truck (Smithsonian)
8. Nineteen ideas for redesigning the world after COVID-19 (Politico)
9. A haunting memorial of lynching in Montgomery, AL (CityLab)
10. Olalekan Jeyifous's afrofuturist visions of Brooklyn, NY (Curbed)
11. A pop-up retail toolkit for COVID-19 recovery (Wallplay)
12. A primer on homelessness in the United States (CityLab)
13. A Black Lives Matter mural that reflects the values of the movement in its process (Fast Company)
14. An ever-growing crowdsourced collection of maps of everyday life during the pandemic (CityLab)