Adaptative public spaces: building safe places for people during the COVID-19 pandemic

Closed streets in Manhattan, NYC. The initiative to open streets to pedestrians allowed communities to use public spaces - mainly in high-density neighborhoods - and was crucial to support small businesses during the COVID-19 shutdown. Author: Bruno Ragi (2020).

The COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions have deeply changed the relationship of citizens to their streets, public spaces, and facilities. This crisis has shown the importance of public open spaces in combating the pandemic, either by directly limiting the spread of the virus, or providing ways for people to safely relax and carry out their livelihood. However, it has also demonstrated how public spaces are unevenly distributed throughout many cities - especially in low-income neighborhoods, where there are few shared open spaces such as parks, plazas, or playgrounds, highlighting the social and racial inequities that persist in our society. 

By revealing successful strategies and tactics, planners, designers, and community leaders have pointed the way towards more inclusive and adaptive methods in public spaces planning. From re-allocating road spaces to pedestrians and local businesses in NYC to adapting areas for food distribution or community food gardening in Rio de Janeiro, the shared use of streets and other open spaces has shown how public spaces have the power to be multi-functional and adaptable, helping our communities to address equitable access and envisage an end to the pandemic worldwide.

Urban Tinkering: The Innovative and Sustainable Approach for Broken Spaces

Common urban issues we face today revolve around the effects of environmental changes. While this problem has been longing, the extent to which it will improve or worsen depends on cities impending actions.

In 2018, a group of researchers put forward the propounding concept of Urban Tinkering, which aims to answer social, economic, and ecological demands through sustainable development and redevelopment of urban amenities. Urban tinkering is a transformative approach in tackling environmental planning, engineering, and managing of the urban environment. The idea steers to adapt, alter, and repurpose dysfunctional structures into more practical and beneficial uses for the society.

“Urban Tinkering can function by promoting a diversity of small-scale urban experiments that, in aggregate, lead to large-scale often playful innovative solutions to the problems of sustainable development” (Elmqvist, Thomas, et al., pp.1., 2018).

The concept reinforces the currently lacking bridge between crucial experts in development, including planners, engineers, architects, ecologists, and others. As a result, urban tinkering has supplemented and enhanced traditional development through its unpredictability, flexibility, and multi-faceted approaches. Essentially, adopting this attitude in planning and design would be valuable as it brings advantages to the environment as well as citizens’ welfare.

References

Elmqvist, T., Siri, J., Andersson, E., Anderson, P., Bai, X., Das, P. K., Gatere, T., Gonzalez, A., Goodness,

J., Handel, S. N., Hermansson Török, E., Kavonic, J., Kronenberg, J., Lindgren, E., Maddox, D., Maher, R., Mbow, C., McPhearson, T., Mulligan, J., Nordenson, G., Spires, M., Stenkula, U., Takeuchi, K., Vogel, C. (2018). Urban tinkering. Sustainability Science, 13(6), 1549–1564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0611-0

Temporary autonomous spaces. On time, space and insurgencies.

The occupation of space is crucial for the development of self-determination, autonomy and sense of place. However, the question of time (in addition to space) is often overlooked. Autonomy is made of practices, networks, flows, organization and exchanges. These obviously unfold in a given space, but they can also survive beyond the space. When for one reason or another we have to move into another place, we can take the practices with us. Therefore, we can say that autonomy survives in time – even though not necessarily in space.  This is applicable to our own personal spaces, homes, working places and public spaces.

This is the main argument of Hakim Bey (1991) in his classic book Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ). Bey describes how utopia can only materialize ephemerally (after all utopia, u-topos in Greek, literally means “in no place”). These types of places are flexible, mutable and nomadic. Therefore, they become fertile ground for creativity and experimentation. The following story about an occupied social center in Barcelona helps us reflect about the concept of TAZ and its potential as an alternative conceptual tactic of citymaking. 

The Rimaia stays in the neighborhood  

Figure 1. La Rimaia remains in the neighborhood. Activists marching in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood and preparing to occupy an apartment. Source: Silvano De la Llata. Barcelona, 2010.

In the summer of 2010, The Free University of La Rimaia was evicted for the second time from a squatted building. The eviction occurred at 7:00 AM, and in question of hours a demonstration of about three thousand people was organized. Chanting the slogan La Rimaia es queda al barri! (La Rimaia remains in the barrio) they marched around the neighborhood and after two hours they collectively broke into an abandoned building and squat it. By 7:00 PM La Rimaia had a new campus.  Since then La Rimaia had been evicted twice more, but it still remains in the barrio.

Figure 2. Map of the march. Source: Silvano De la Llata. Barcelona, 2010.

La Rimaia was founded in 2008-2009 as a response to the Bologna Process to standardize higher education in Europe.  It began as a debate workshop in a squatted houses and it soon started being called a free university. It is leaderless, it has no academic hierarchies and delivers no diplomas. It is a center to learn about and from quotidian practices. It’s motto Crear, Lluitar, Poder Popular (Create, Struggle, People’s Power) reveals they thought of the Okupa (Squatter) Movement: it describes practices, rather than values.  Everyday practice, as described in the work of Lefebvre, Debord, Bourdieu and De Certeau, is the inspiration of the Okupa Movement. To elude the cooptation and crystallization of an ideology they want to be defined by what they do rather by what they say, read or think.  Therefore, a physical space is secondary, as practices can be reproduced in different settings.  

The spirit of the Okupa Movement is summarized in the subtitle of the recently released film Squat: La ville est à nous (The city is within ourselves). In the film, as in most Okupa marches, you can hear the slogan “Un desalojo, otra okupacion!” (“One eviction, another occupation!”), that refers to the fact that the idea that inspired the squat can be taken into a different one after eviction (en.unifrance.org, 2011). 

Figure 3. Occupied house in Barcelona. Occupied houses were often used as spaces of artistic and social experimentation. Source: Silvano De la Llata. Barcelona, 2010.

Back to the eviction of La Rimaia, the activists left the place from where they were evicted and “carried” the autonomy into the new house (See Figure)  At the end of the day, the demonstration stopped in front of a building where the soon-to-be occupied apartment was. A group of activists opened the door from inside and when they looked down the crowd cheered. The environment was festive. One of the activists that I interviewed, smiled at me and said: “This is a beautiful occupation!” There was no mourning for the loss of the previous space. They were now excited about the new start that the actual occupation entailed:  Autonomy surviving in time, but not in space.

Figure 4. Okupa activist. Source: Silvano De la Llata. Barcelona, 2010.

Matchmaking in the community: Restaurants X Artists

Food brings comfort to the body and soul. Art comforts the disturbed. What more could we ask for when the two come together hand-in-hand? The Neighbourhood Curbside Canvas Project in New York City is a neighbourhood relief effort that pairs local restaurants and bars with local artists. The force behind this project is Bill Tsapalas, a long-time residence of the Tribeca neighbourhood in NYC. Growing up in a restaurant family Bill is aware of the difficult times restaurants and bars are going through during the pandemic times. As a creative director and marketer himself, Bill pairs up restaurants with artists. Targeting outdoor dining spaces, artists helped turn makeshift plywood dining structures into curbside street art installations.

Restaurants get hit hard by the pandemic while artists also go through various struggles with the shutting down of art galleries and cancellation of exhibitions and activities. With this Neighbourhood Curbside Canvas Project, local artists are provided with platforms to perform and showcase their creativity. The vibrant outdoor dining spaces create visual interests, enhance dining experience and bring life back in the neighbourhood.

Here is how the ‘matchmaking’ works:

The Neighbourhood Curbside Canvas Project is a volunteer-based project.  Local artists voluntarily work with the restaurants while restaurants feed the artists and pay for the supplies. The Dark Horse was the first restaurant/bar to participate in this project. Six weeks after the pilot project, 2o volunteer artists had transformed 13 restaurants’ pop-up patios into street art. Check out more artists in action here!

Artist Tato was paired with Weather Up TriBeCa, a craft cocktail bar on Duane Street: