How coronavirus could bring cities closer to home
BARCELONA: In the once-bustling Eixample district, birdsong and the occasional whir of a food delivery cyclist have replaced the continuous din of passing traffic - making lockdown life unexpectedly bucolic in this Barcelona neighborhood. Lara Ocon, a local resident who works in marketing, said life has become more peaceful in the cosmopolitan district since Spain implemented strict social distancing orders on March 14 to stem the spread of the new coronavirus.
“I spend weekends sunbathing with a book ... there is something very enjoyable in a slower pace and more local lifestyle,” Ocon said. Before the lockdown, she said, she had a busy social life and travelled abroad extensively for work - in January alone, she flew to Colombia, Iceland and the Netherlands. “This pause makes me think that, really, that lifestyle is absolutely crazy,” she said. 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 Netherlandsbased 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 16square 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 - organized 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. The idea of organizing 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 meters apart, with 90-cm 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. — Reuters