What Still Matters in a City The COVID-19 Pandemic Offers a “Teachable Moment” Illustrating that Public Spaces Must Simultaneously Connect us, and Protect us too
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Abstract
Various commentators have sought to assess the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban form and public space, with predictions ranging from “the end of urban density,” to a new impetus for auto-encapsulated sprawl, to exacerbation of the effects of urban inequality, to an explosion of digital surveillance, to a return to relative normalcy with new protective strategies. Here we tease out a more basic lesson about public space: that it is far from one amorphous thing, but it has both connective and protective characteristics. Its structure has a profound impact upon the life of the city and the health and well-being of its residents. Furthermore, it is up to us, as practitioners at the interface of science and policy, to chart the very real choices emerging for a better generation of public space and urban form.
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