How Do We Rethink Public Space After the Pandemic? Start With Rolls of Tape.

[brooklynite]

New York Magazine

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are learning to hit their marks on it, guided by bits of colored tape. Tape has become a low-tech weapon in COVID-19-induced urbanism, measuring out spots for customers to stand in line for groceries, X-ing out park benches that are too close together, defining safety zones spaces in elevators and subways. We know where to stand and why, grateful for these scraps of guidance and, at the same time, resentful at the necessary regimentation. Bit by bit, cities are rolling out informal instruction manuals for a new standard of social behavior, and the messages can feel infantilizing: Stand here, don’t sit there, keep out. But tape is also a liberating force, breathing new flexibility into urban infrastructure that is built to resist change. The challenge of the next chapter will be to make that flexibility permanent.

In the coming years, state and local governments may not have the money to throw at long-term plans and vast fixed infrastructure costs. Managing streets and public spaces, though, requires little more than tape, traffic cones, spray paint, and a sense of urgency. In a matter of weeks, officials and private citizens all over the world have jury-rigged enormous metropolitan areas. Groceries arrive by cargo bikes. Restaurants sell groceries. Sheets of stapled plastic protect cashiers. In Tel Aviv, organizers of an anti-government demonstration marked off Rabin Square to show thousands of protesters while maintaining safe distances. The result was a gathering so pointillistic that it qualifies as performance art.

As a post-lockdown city edges into view, we’ll have to develop new ways to use the places we share, from public restrooms to restaurants, classrooms, hallways, subway cars, and sidewalks. Prodded by fear and guided by tape, we will develop new social dances that resemble the formal ballroom steps of yore: “Step back, slide, turn away, and touch as little as possible.” The rules will change as the science does. We can’t yet reliably pinpoint the likelihood of being infected on a beach or a subway platform, by touching an elevator button, sitting on a park bench, or sharing a car. We don’t know how legitimately outraged to get when we feel a jogger’s wake against our cheek or whether those who have had the disease run the risk of reinfection or infecting others. We’re unsure how to feel as we move through terrain we can’t fully control; I suspect it will be a long while before most of us are willing to sit shoulder to shoulder in an auditorium, pinned in place for hours on end.

One thing is clear: The virus is redefining our relationship to both personal and public space, and we’re going to need more of both. New York, one of the world’s great pedestrian cities, is still imperfectly engineered for the COVID era. As Meli Harvey, an intrepid student of sidewalk widths (and an employee of Sidewalk Labs) has pointed out in a new interactive map, most of the city’s walkways don’t allow two passersby to give each other wide berth, let alone an ordinary crowd. And just try keeping proper distance from the person coming toward you on one of those all-too-common stretches of sidewalk segmented by scaffolding and lined with garbage bags. If the virus returns with cold weather, the first snow will dramatize how clumsily we use the space we have, leaving narrow channels alongside berms of ice and turning every corner into an impassable slough.