Social Space, Physical Distance

By Stephanie Parker

One of the things Lynne Peskoe-Yang, a science writer who lives in Tarrytown, New York, misses about life before social distancing is working from one of the two coffee shops in her town. In fact, now that she's stuck at home, she sometimes plays an eight-hour YouTube video of ambient coffee shop noises while she works. She says it helps.

Peskoe-Yang is also coping by spending time on her neighborhood's Facebook group, which was previously mostly used for multilevel marketing pitches and minor complaints. Now, the group uses the page for organizing food donations to local hospitals, posting photos of supportive signs for health-care workers, and sharing advice, like how to make your own cat litter.

"It's just very neighborhoody," Peskoe-Yang says. "It feels like much more a part of the neighborhood community than it used to. Now it really matters who you live next to. That physical proximity gives a different meaning to this page."

The idea that it matters who you live next to right now seems almost comical, when we're supposed to avoid people as much as possible and communicate with our neighbors the way we would with someone halfway around the world. Block parties have become Zoom meetings, community centers and some parks are shuttered, and public transportation has become something to be avoided unless completely necessary. Spending most of our days inside our homes, we could be almost anywhere. And yet, where we live — and the public spaces we use to connect with our communities — still matters, maybe even more now than ever.

New Yorkers walk around Central Park's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in late April. Photo by Sarah Blesener/The New York Times.

"Public space is one of the key features of the urban fabric that makes cities resilient and adaptive," says Jennifer Wolch, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. "We started thinking about this a long time ago in terms of climate change. Here, what we see is that they're also part of a strategy around social and health resilience in the face of this pandemic."

COVID-19 has already changed the way these spaces are viewed and used. And while being out in public is currently a source of anxiety for many, the communities built by public spaces are proving vital during these exceptional times, as people are counting more on neighbors and reaching out to strangers. But not everyone has had access to the same kinds of public space, which has significant repercussions that the current pandemic has emphasized. As we move through — and hopefully past — the pandemic, it is important to understand what our public spaces offer us, how this crisis is changing them, and what the role and form of public spaces could look like in the future.

Members of the New Orleans nonprofit Sprout Nola maintain their physical distance while working in a community garden. Around the country, local growing operations are filling the dual need for fresh produce and safe social outdoor time. By Cedric Angeles/The New York Times.

Building resilience

Social infrastructure — places like libraries, public transportation, and public parks — plays a key role in building community resilience. During natural disasters like hurricanes, heat waves, or floods, people seek shelter in community spaces or turn to their neighbors, people they know from shared experiences within nearby public spaces, for help. During Chicago's disastrous 1995 heat wave, which saw more than 700 deaths, neighborhoods that had received investment in public spaces, community organizations, and good sidewalks were found to have lower death rates. Residents were able to access resources and lean on social capital, the investment in social relationships and connections, that had been built in these spaces before the heat wave.

During an infectious disease epidemic, the role of public space might seem less clear. After all, the last thing we want to do is physically gather. But social capital has already been created in places where these public spaces exist, and communities can leverage that.

Community gardens and green spaces, already used to improve health and food security and provide opportunities for youth development, have taken on new importance during the pandemic.

Groundwork USA Southcoast, a Massachusetts-based branch of Groundwork USA, a network of local trusts focused on the natural and built environments in low-resource areas, has a Green Team of youth dedicated to urban gardening. The project was not planned to deal with a pandemic; it was developed to teach youth agriculture skills and improve the physical neighborhood. But now, that team is growing seedlings at home with the goal of selling the eventual produce in venues that accept SNAP benefits and distributing the rest to food-insecure neighbors.

"We're drawing on previously created benefits of place, of living together," says Jerold Kayden, the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. We're seeing this all over, with neighbors making music, enjoying food, celebrating health-care providers, and delivering groceries and care packages, together but apart.

Virtual public space

As physical distancing recommendations have shut down or changed community meeting places, people have swiftly migrated to digital spaces for social connections. A few weeks ago, Jesse Hirsch, a journalist living in New York City's East Harlem neighborhood, made a pizza from dough given to him by his neighbor, whom he had never actually met. He offered some extra chicken pate in exchange via a listserv, and they left the items outside one another's door, making sure not to actually meet. The building listserv is proving to be more open than a real-world neighborhood often is — Hirsch had previously only met one of his neighbors, but now he's in regular contact with nearly a dozen of them. In New York City and other major cities, there's a joke that many residents never meet their neighbors. This crisis has introduced people in ways that might not have happened offline.

Social media apps are proving to be a powerful source of community organizing. Nextdoor, an app that acts as a virtual meeting place and discussion board for neighborhoods, has partnered with Walmart to allow people to easily ask their neighbors to shop for them if they don't feel comfortable leaving the house. And beyond corporate partnerships, mutual aid groups are organizing over social media, Google Docs, or even by phone to quickly mobilize and meet community needs. Hundreds of these groups are working to support their neighbors during the pandemic, particularly the elderly, people with disabilities, sex workers, indigenous people, and trans and queer youth.

Cities are getting in on the digital action too. The Downtown Austin Alliance threw an Instagram cinco de Mayo celebration that offered not only community engagement, but a real economic boost for the vendors who participated and could sell their crafts to attendees. Musicians played online sets, and a cocktail demonstration was held over video. Any other year, this event would have taken place in person in Republic Square, an urban greenspace in downtown Austin.

Planners like UC Berkeley's Wolch see opportunities for public spaces to become more virtually accessible. Although the move to online fitness began with private gyms and fitness studios, public parks and recreation departments are now offering similar low-cost or free classes. Mamaroneck, 22 miles outside New York City, offers fitness, dance, and craft classes for free. National parks and historic sites have also begun offering virtual tours.

Public spaces that let people spend time safely outdoors don't have to be on the grand scale of a city park, or even permanent. In Dallas, businesses can apply for temporary parklets to expand outdoor dining. Better Block, a local nonprofit, helps business owners navigate city approvals. Photo by Ben Torres.

Accessibility

While the digital divide persists — around 19 million Americans still lack at-home broadband access — virtual gatherings can still, in some ways, be more inclusive.

"I think disabled people have always known that public space is not just physical public space," says Shannon Finnegan, an artist with a disability whose work deals with accessibility and public space. "There are lots of people who for various reasons are not leaving their houses or not leaving their houses easily, so it's been really important for disability communities to be connected in other ways."

Those communities are paying particular attention to the accommodations being made quickly during the pandemic. Finnegan says she has friends who have lost jobs in the past because they needed to work remotely and their employer wouldn't allow it. Now, of course, many of these jobs are easily allowing their employees to work from home to comply with social distancing guidelines.

"Maybe there will be more awareness that it isn't that complicated," she says.

In many ways, the pandemic is giving people without disabilities a small taste of what it is like to try and navigate a world that does not accommodate your needs. Many people are just now becoming aware of how narrow sidewalks can be and how hard certain places are to reach without easy access to public transportation.

Some cities, like Boston, Minneapolis, and Oakland, California, are dealing with the problem of narrow sidewalks by closing streets to make more space for pedestrians and cyclists. In cities that aren't, residents are taking matters into their own hands — like in Washington, D.C., where residents are blocking off streets themselves with traffic cones. The trend seems to have been started by a tactical urbanist organization called the DC Department of Transformation.

Even in places with strict stay-at-home orders, most people are encouraged to go outside for solo, socially distanced fresh air and exercise. For many in urban areas, that means going to a public park — but when it comes to access to trails and parks and the like, not all neighborhoods are created equal. The legacy of redlining can still be felt to this day, and the resulting majority-minority neighborhoods often lack investment and infrastructure.

A Portland State University study from earlier this year found that historically redlined neighborhoods are, on average, five degrees Fahrenheit warmer than other neighborhoods because of lack of investment in parks, green spaces, trees, and public transportation — all things that keep us cooler and help prevent the urban heat island effect.

Residents in historically redlined neighborhoods and other marginalized areas are also disproportionately exposed to pollution, which can cause chronic health conditions; a 2019 analysis from Berkeley looking at eight California cities found that redlined neighborhoods have higher rates of asthma. This is all the more problematic right now, when air pollution has been linked to increased COVID-19 deaths, and all the more apparent, given that majority Latinx and Black neighborhoods are experiencing higher death rates from the coronavirus than other demographics.

And while the health impacts of racism go much deeper than access to public space and pollution, the types of neighborhoods people live in cannot be discounted.

In areas too dense for the addition of expansive, vegetation-filled parks, smaller, quick-win projects can be a starting point. "As an urban planner, we love parks," says Annie Koh, a lecturer at Cal Poly. "But we should make a distinction about the kinds of parks that are necessary right now. They don't have to be the fancy parks that we get entranced by." Parklets, or even just wider sidewalks, give more people the ability to take walks and remain six feet from one another. This kind of infrastructure also calls for trees for shade and benches for sitting in the fresh air.

More parklets have popped up in the last few weeks. In Dallas, the Better Block nonprofit built a model parklet with seating. Although it is not a green space, it does allow people to get fresh air and sit outside at least six feet apart without blocking the sidewalk. Parklets are gaining even more traction when it comes to businesses, as restaurants look for options to expand the number of outdoor tables they can have while maintaining sufficient distance between parties.

The new public space

So what will public spaces look like in the eventual aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic? While some designers are looking at innovative and eye-catching ways to make public spaces more able to support social distancing, like the intricate maze-shaped Parc de la Distance, which allows people to be in a park together while separated by thick hedges, other planners are thinking in much simpler terms.

"I'm hoping that something that will be sparked in people is that our neighborhoods don't look like this by accident, and that they won't change by accident," says Cate Mingoya, a city planner and the director of capacity building for Groundwork USA, a network of local trusts focused on the natural and built environments in low-resource parts of the U.S. So many neighborhoods, she explains, are lacking the spaces they need. She's hopeful this experience will make people reevaluate public space, both physical and digital, and value it more. "We can fix this. And it's relatively inexpensive to do," she says. We just need to "make sure that communities are in the driver's seat."

In the future, instead of designing cities to move people around as quickly as possible, design could prioritize the comfort and sustainability of neighborhoods, she says, through the addition of trees, benches, and pedestrian-friendly roadways. After all, we're spending a lot of time in our neighborhoods, and that could increase with a likely economic recession or depression on the horizon, even without the threat of infection.

"One thing that this experience probably highlights for people," says UC Berkeley's Wolch, "is how important in their lives their public spaces are."

Stephanie Parker is a freelance writer who was born and raised in New York City and now lives in the mountains of Switzerland. You can find her work at stephaniedparker.com.

Need a Break? Take a Short Walk to a Park

Residents try out the interactive musical play units (temporarily off-limits) at Woodcrest Play Park in Los Angeles County. Photo by Natasha Krakowiak.

By Clement Lau, AICP

Parks and other green spaces are essential to physical, emotional, and mental health and well-being — especially now.

Think about a short walk around your neighborhood. Does it include a park? It should. The "10-Minute Walk Campaign" is a nationwide movement to ensure that everyone has safe access to a quality park or green space within 10 minutes of home. It is rooted in the belief that parks are essential to the physical, social, environmental, and economic health of a community, and the movement seeks to improve park access through local policy changes, master planning efforts, and increased funding opportunities. The program was established in 2017 by the National Recreation and Park Association, the Trust for Public Land, and the Urban Land Institute.

The Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR), a campaign member, is working to advance park access and equity. Its Woodcrest Play Park opened to the public in late 2019. The innovative project transformed an underused space at Woodcrest Library into a small but vibrant public park, with a book-themed children's play space, seating with laptop charging stations, outdoor exercise equipment, and drought-tolerant plants.

Created through a collaboration between DPR and Los Angeles County Library, Woodcrest Play Park is located in the unincorporated community of Westmont, which has about 33,000 residents and a "Very High" level of park need according to the 2016 Los Angeles Countywide Parks and Recreation Needs Assessment. Thanks to the new park, 57 percent of Westmont residents now live within a 10-minute walk of a park. That number was just 35 percent before. It means that an additional 7,000 residents, including 2,000 young people, can access a nearby park. The 10-Minute Walk Campaign complements various planning efforts, including the Pedestrian Plan, Vision Zero Action Plan, Transit-Oriented District Specific Plan, and the Countywide Sustainability Plan, which seek to get more people walking and make it safer to do so.

During the COVID-19 crisis, we are asked to stay home as much as possible, but we can walk in our neighborhoods, including nearby parks, as long as we practice physical distancing. Access to parks is critical for our physical, emotional, and mental health and well-being, especially during these trying times — and particularly for those without a car. In LA County, parks remain open during the pandemic, but certain amenities are off-limits. At Woodcrest Play Park, exercise and playground equipment are taped off to encourage physical distancing and decrease spread of the disease.

It is important that local jurisdictions pursue creative partnerships and projects to provide public spaces where residents can exercise, recreate, and relieve stress close to home. Park planners must also adopt an intersectional approach that requires us to look beyond park boundaries and collaborate with partners to address important factors like safety, land use, and transportation that affect how and whether residents travel to and use existing and future parks.

Clement Lau is a departmental facilities planner with the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation.