Let’s use what COVID-19 has taught us to redesign our city

From retail to roadways, offices to home, we should adapt, says Toon Dreessen.

The last few weeks of physical distancing have had a profound impact on our cities and our way of life. Our traditional main streets are largely empty and the small businesses that thrive on walk-in patronage aren’t open. Libraries are closed, parks and museums are shuttered.

In a matter of days, we’ve shifted thousands of people into working from home, while frontline workers in restaurants, bars and retail stores have been laid off. Unemployment has skyrocketed and hotels have closed. This has had a huge effect on the economy.

Our kids are home and we try to keep up with the schoolwork. Daycares are closed, adding uncertainty to working parents who still have jobs, but suddenly find it difficult to work. Once underutilized home offices, dining rooms and dens have been repurposed into workspaces.

We don’t know if this will last a few more weeks, or months. We do know that, eventually, it will end. When things get back to normal, we’ll have to decide what that normal is.

The new City of Ottawa Official Plan talks about creating a denser, walkable, bikeable city. This plan was aspirational when it was first revealed. But when politicians ask for help to maintain the physical distancing that is important today, and are told to fund it out of office budgets, it shows the true aspirations of our city: Increasing walkability and providing space for cycling isn’t worth a bold citywide effort.

How can we redesign our city streets and sidewalks to provide the physical distance we need, and forge the community we aspire to, if we don’t see city staff and politicians wanting to take the lead? Other cities, including Calgary and Edmonton, are doing this already. Temporary conversion of parking to bike lanes would increase our ability to safely navigate our streets, while increasing pedestrian and cyclist traffic. Keeping this permanent in the immediate post-COVID-19 months would be a great opportunity to put the new Official Plan into action and boost the economic fortunes of traditional main streets.

Right now, our retail workplaces need to address how front-line workers interact with the public. Temporary plastic barriers around cashiers need to be replaced with better, permanent design changes such as deeper serving counters to safely separate customers from staff. We may need less seating in cafés and coffee shops and more patio space where we can enjoy peace and quiet on those wider sidewalks intended by the Official Plan.

Office spaces have also gotten smaller. As more employers move to smaller workstations, desk hoteling and flexible collaborative work areas, we’re put into ever closer contact with our co-workers. In a post-COVID-19 world, will people still want to share space the same way? How should our workplaces change to allow physical distancing while bringing people together to collaborate? We need to rethink our approach to telecommuting, increasing acceptance of something that the accessibility community has been wanting for years. This is an opportunity to rethink how we design workspaces.

Our homes need to accommodate how we might spend more time in them. Urban housing is increasingly in apartments; high land and development costs, combined with a housing crunch, means that these spaces are smaller than suburban homes. While the density is good, we’ve lost space for permanent home offices.

High rental prices mean people may have roommates and decreased personal space. In the short term, working off a corner of the dining room table is fine, but if this is going to be a longer-term trend, we need to rethink how we design our homes to be flexible and maintainable while providing a setting to work from home.

This current crisis will pass. And when it does, we need to decide how we want life to go on. Do we go back to the way things were or do we take this opportunity for change? Let’s work to achieve the city we aspire to and see how our work and home settings can change to enhance our quality of life. Design matters. Architects can help.