Daily Times

As city dwellers around the world are forced to stay closer to home, some architects are rethinking urban infrastructure to promote a more local lifestyle and help people adapt to a post-pandemic world.

Harm Timmermans, owner of Netherlands-based Shift architecture urbanism, said he was inspired by his own experience of shopping in Rotterdam when he came up with the concept of a pandemic-friendly ‘Hyperlocal Micromarket’.

“The first day of the Dutch shutdown, I went to the supermarket and I realised that they are the weakest link in terms of social distancing – the rules are very hard to keep there,” he said over the phone.

But with local markets shut, many people had no choice but to brave the city’s supermarkets, he noted.

So, Timmermans created a simple 16-square grid design for a tiny marketplace that can be quickly and cheaply assembled in public squares, allowing people to shop local while also following social distancing guidelines.

Each micromarket consists of just three stalls – each selling a different kind of produce – organised around the grid, which holds a maximum of six customers at a time.

The stalls have separate counters for orders and collection, and the marketplace has one entrance and two exits. “Friendly, smaller markets are needed in more points across cities and towns … this could be applied to most Western societies,” Timmermans stressed.

Local markets can also be essential to the city’s poorest – so they need to remain open even during pandemics, the architect noted.

“In some places, markets are still cheaper than supermarkets. So, keeping markets accessible can help vulnerable groups,” he said.

Maze-like parks

The idea of organising urban infrastructure around social distancing principles also underpins a new maze-like design for a crowd-free public park by Studio Precht, an architecture studio based in Austria.

Their Parc de la Distance was conceived as a proposal for a vacant lot in Vienna but could be replicated on any unused patch of urban land, of any size, the architects said.

The paths in the park are 2.4 metres (8 feet) apart, with 90-cm (35-inch) hedges dividing them, allowing visitors to experience the benefits of green space while remaining at a safe physical distance.

But it’s not only public areas that could be reshaped by the impact of coronavirus.

With many predicting that the pandemic will result in more people working from home even after lockdowns are lifted, the race is on to redesign domestic spaces.

There are a number of explanations for the force of historical inertia in urban spaces. The creative classes and politics that give shape to the built environment require expertise, organization and trusting relationships, all of which take time to build. The bureaucratic institutions that ultimately manage these spaces are, by intention, rarely revolutionary in nature. Even new technology, as the historian David Edgerton has illustrated, rarely ushers in immediate change. And finally, there is the intersection of urban areas and the wider economy. Whether cities are shaped to attract investors or businesses or are shaped as much by them, capitalism has shown itself capable of both adapting to and shaping new forms of space.

For those hoping that we might at this moment be shocked into some historic urban transformation, the story of continuity will not be welcome news. Our path as a species was unsustainable before the myriad challenges, expected and unexpected, that will be wrought by this pandemic. There is also hope, however. The urban story of the last two decades includes a number of developments, from the highly local to the global, that, like pre-WWII Modernism, could rise in prominence and shape our urban futures long after their initial appearance. Consider five continuing developments that will be central to shaping the post-pandemic urban world.

First, leading architects, and the international prizes that champion them, have prioritized new and innovative approaches to affordable housing. Bauhaus is trendy today not only because of the recent anniversary of its founding, but also because of its commitment to style, accessibility and the integration of social thinking into urban design — principles carried forward with important innovations by architects like Alejandro Aravena, B.V. Doshi and others.

Second, new materials and practices developed over the past couple decades, such as ultra-strong timber towers and biophilic design, promise to make cities more sustainable without necessarily sacrificing density.

Third, regional or metropolitan approaches to challenges such as housing and transportation have gained momentum. Michael Berkowitz, the former head of 100 Resilient Cities, recently noted in CityLab that “governors seem to be having much more impact than mayors during this pandemic, because they’ve been able to have a remit across various administrative boundaries.” Local leaders led the earliest and most meaningful coronavirus responses: Before shelter-in-place orders went out across California, seven counties in the Bay Area issued an order simultaneously. Such cooperation, already built and now strengthened, is likely to continue.

Fourth, networks of cities, such as Metropolis and scores of others, are enabling urban voices to be heard collectively on the global stage, while organizing local action against challenges like the climate crisis. These networks have built strong relationships between mayors and are already showing themselves nimble enough to pivot to the coronavirus challenge. They are, in other words, well organized to meet an emergent crisis without totally losing sight of the continuing ones.

Fifth and finally, much of the global urban community in the form of networks, research institutions and civil society has increasingly turned its focus to cities and urban areas in the Global South. The Centre for Livable Cities in Singapore, the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town, and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements stand as three of the premier institutions that combine research and practices; Shack/Slum Dwellers International has over the last two-plus-decades led the development of civil society engagement, knowledge building and urban mapping in informal areas. The history of Covid-19 in urban areas with high levels of informal housing is being written now. Those histories may very well be frightful, but the resilience therein and reconstitutions thereafter will be furthered by expertise already developed.