Planning under coronavirus: Time for a rethink

Advent of coronavirus should make us reconsider the things we have always passively considered normal.

As a people, we have often spoken of our high or diminishing standards. Or the need to rethink our standards to match global trends.

We have always considered ourselves higher up and believe strongly that our standards are better than the rest. Whether we are there or not, that is a question for another day.

Urban planning is a coordinative profession that helps in the packaging of various sectoral standards; environmental and public health, water, sanitation, housing and human habitat.

It defines how many and what type of educational facilities should be expected in a place and space.

It speaks also to the numbers of people that should be expected in a given space and the ancillary facilities that must support them including recreational facilities.

Standards inform how a good or service has to be designed bearing in mind how it is going to be used or manoeuvred. Huts, found largely in the rural areas, were designed to minimise unwanted entrants into them. Ironically, we have also heard how caskets have failed to be moved in or out of these huts.

The common, often misleading interpretation usually is that a dead person’s spirit has displayed anger etcetera, yet from a design point of view, the door was never designed with a casket in mind.

Again, in the rural areas, some non- governmental organisations have often donated boreholes, handpumped, which women and children often find difficult to operate. This is a failure to design with a perspective of who the users will be.

A minimum standard is a basic requirement that takes into account the expectations that the user has to achieve or the benefit that they must derive from a given product, good or service.

Conventional wisdom is the primary source of the standards that we use. We also refer to anthropometry and ergonomics. If the average tallest person is two metres in height, we can make a door or door frame that is 2,1 metres to accommodate that person.

The size of the chair that a child can sit on should take into consideration the length of the legs that an average child has.

Simply put, anthropometry is the measurement of the human individual whereas ergonomics is the application of psychological and physiological standards in the design of services and products.

It is considered an error if a service or good is provided and then it fails to attract adequate numbers of people to support it.

For instance, in the 1960s, the United Kingdom ended up having to convert primary schools which no longer attracted children into training and tertiary colleges.

Zimbabwe now has a lot of universities, public and private. This has seen a number of cities and towns where these universities are situated expanding in their tenant-accommodation to students, what I call the studentisation of the urban space.

Homeowners have maximised on this development. Some disused rooms and outbuilding including garages have been converted to students’ rented accommodation. Some rooms are stashed with bunk beds. An eight-by-eight metre room could be accommodating as many as six, seven or even more persons. This is typical overcrowding.

Another example is that of cities and towns in Zimbabwe where hostels that were designed to accommodate “bachelors”, as they were called during the colonial days, now accommodate families of up to 10 people.

In most of these hostels there is no proper lighting, no heating, ablution facilities are dysfunctional, living conditions are inhuman and unhygienic, to name these few.

Chapter four of the Humanitarian Charter, Minimum Standards in Shelter Settlement and Non-Food Items (Sphere Standards) puts the minimum standard for human individual at 3,5 square metres.

We might want to stand back a bit and reflect on how many homes in the country provide for such.

Not forgetting also that most of the houses are deemed single-family dwellings yet they are loaded with three or five lodgers in them. What a menace, especially in the wake of the deadly coronavirus.

Some of these rooms we are lodging out could be used for self-isolation by members of our families in case they get sick from the coronavirus.

Section 73 of the Zimbabwean Constitution speaks of the right to access a clean environment. There are standards to everything; construction, lighting, ventilation and sanitation.

Some of these standards are spelt out in the Model Building By-Laws of 1977, the Housing Standards Act, the Public Health Act, the Environmental Management Act, the Urban Councils Act and the Regional, Town and Country Planning Act.

The biggest scapegoat has been that the standards stipulated in these regulatory instruments are steep, archaic and difficult to implement.

One proverbial argument has been that they were not designed for us. If so, why not sit down a select number of experts and make the necessary adjustments?

Failing to meet or live according to stipulated standards is a misdemeanour. The advent of Covid-19 should make us rethink and attune ourselves and our apparatus to rethink standards. It is not only a matter of political will but also social will to adjust.

Standards should not be static. However, the standards must help in regulating and facilitating the mobility, habitability of space and usability of goods and services.

Standards speak to comfort, safety and functionality.

They can also even speak of longevity, durability and the market. We may ask if whose standards matter but we should consider we cannot operate without them.