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Journal of Urban Design and Mental Health; 2020:6; 3
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EDITORIAL: COVID-19 PERSPECTIVES
Reimagining urban public space during COVID-19: implications for public mental health
Kavya Anchuri
University of Calgary, Canada
University of Calgary, Canada
What does it mean to gather communally and for leisure? Which infrastructural elements must align in order to facilitate gathering communally? In the era of physical distancing to curtail COVID-19 transmission, how do we reconceptualize communal gathering, and how can urban design facilitate this transformation?
Prior to COVID-19, communal gathering for leisure in spaces both public and private, outdoor and indoor, did not require specific size restrictions beyond the occupational limits and safety regulations of the spaces themselves. Choosing the right leisurely gathering space could be determined, for example, by the utility or applicability of that space to the purpose of gathering; the aesthetic appeal of a space to the people who would gather there; the adaptability of the space to serve different types of gathering needs; the proximity of and ease of access to the space for those who would use it; and the social, cultural, historical, geographic, and topographic context of the space; among myriad other functions and characteristics of space. By contrast, COVID-19 has imposed certain restrictions on gathering that prioritize a few key spatial determinants of infection prevention over all others mentioned here. These include, among others, adequate ventilation and airflow, capacity for physical distancing between individuals, minimal risk of exposure to high-touch surfaces, and easily and frequently-cleaned surfaces where present. These new requirements arising as a result of the pandemic have pushed us into spaces that are naturally conducive to our infection prevention goals: the great (public) outdoors.
Indeed, COVID-19 has reified our need for social interaction and belongingness to community and place. Restrictions around physical distancing have posed opportunities for creativity in urban design, requiring a repurposing of the public milieu to facilitate social interaction while precluding physical proximity. We are witnessing examples of radical repurposing efforts the world over, through actions previously thought unviable or undesirable in otherwise car-centric urban centres. In North America, this has largely included redistributing space from car lanes and re-dedicating it to active transport modalities (bikes, scooters, pedestrians) and outdoor social activity such as distanced outdoor restaurant seating.1,2,3 In Europe, we see yet further expansion of already bike-friendly streets in cities like Paris and Rome.2
The pandemic has forced us out of our private enclosures and into the perceptual fields of others, such that we become part and parcel of others’ experiences of navigating their built environments—allowing for accidental sightings, for serendipitous encounters, and a sense of coexisting within a shared locality even more so than before the pandemic. The seemingly small changes of widening sidewalks and establishing makeshift bike lanes where they were previously absent serve to illustrate what is possible when urban design priorities shift to accommodate humans before cars, to expand the public milieu and excise from the private, in doing so mitigating time spent in hyper-private, hyper-individualized spaces that predispose to loneliness.4
If we choose to depart from notions of individual ownership of space, we embrace collective enjoyment of and responsibility for space. To counteract loneliness is to feel connected not only with the urban spaces one occupies, but also and especially with the other humans and beings who roam it. By contrast, private ownership of lands and structures are inherently exclusionary constructs of capitalism, imperialism, and the hyper-individualism these precipitate—and thus can serve as drivers of loneliness and mood disorders.5 As a society, we have made great strides in recent years to embrace social efforts that seek to dismantle stigma around mental illness. Similarly, we must also embrace a realistic understanding of structural, spatial, and architectural determinants of mental health—one that recognizes place as inextricable from self and calls for reforming the place in pursuit of the well-being of the self. Place shapes identity, priorities, relationships, and politics. Where a person lives becomes part of who they are.
What remains to be seen is whether municipalities will continue the inadvertently humanistic urban interventions that they hurriedly implemented for infection prevention, beyond the period necessitated by the pandemic. That it required circumstances as extreme as a pandemic—no less than a global emergency—for some cities to expand public space for safe communal gathering is telling of the urban design priorities of those city governments. It raises the question of how long it would have taken these cities to improve their urban environments in ways that encourage active transportation, walkability, and belongingness, if not for a pandemic.
Urban designers, researchers, and activists ingratiated with municipal policymakers can leverage the rapid implementation of these built environment modifications as opportunities for evaluation, with the period immediately prior to the urban design intervention serving as a sort of epidemiological counterfactual. A battery of outcomes may be of interest in assessing an urban environmental modification, including characteristics of the environment itself and the effects of those characteristics on the mental and physical wellbeing of people,6 as well as potential changes elicited in human use of the urban space. For example, in the United States, the city of Philadelphia has alone seen a 150% increase in cycling among its residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.3 Other useful measures of impact can include greenspace use and perceived accessibility,7 given the well-documented benefits of access to nature and greenspace on mental and physical health.8
Of the myriad lessons that will be learned from COVID-19 across functional domains and societal institutions, some will lead to permanent, fundamental shifts in the operations and design of those institutions. The expansion of urban public space brought about as a necessity of infection prevention can yield great benefits to municipalities and their inhabitants, by operationalizing the built environment in ways that protect against loneliness and facilitate communal gathering in a time when this has been proven and recognized as essential to maintaining mental and psychosocial health.
Prior to COVID-19, communal gathering for leisure in spaces both public and private, outdoor and indoor, did not require specific size restrictions beyond the occupational limits and safety regulations of the spaces themselves. Choosing the right leisurely gathering space could be determined, for example, by the utility or applicability of that space to the purpose of gathering; the aesthetic appeal of a space to the people who would gather there; the adaptability of the space to serve different types of gathering needs; the proximity of and ease of access to the space for those who would use it; and the social, cultural, historical, geographic, and topographic context of the space; among myriad other functions and characteristics of space. By contrast, COVID-19 has imposed certain restrictions on gathering that prioritize a few key spatial determinants of infection prevention over all others mentioned here. These include, among others, adequate ventilation and airflow, capacity for physical distancing between individuals, minimal risk of exposure to high-touch surfaces, and easily and frequently-cleaned surfaces where present. These new requirements arising as a result of the pandemic have pushed us into spaces that are naturally conducive to our infection prevention goals: the great (public) outdoors.
Indeed, COVID-19 has reified our need for social interaction and belongingness to community and place. Restrictions around physical distancing have posed opportunities for creativity in urban design, requiring a repurposing of the public milieu to facilitate social interaction while precluding physical proximity. We are witnessing examples of radical repurposing efforts the world over, through actions previously thought unviable or undesirable in otherwise car-centric urban centres. In North America, this has largely included redistributing space from car lanes and re-dedicating it to active transport modalities (bikes, scooters, pedestrians) and outdoor social activity such as distanced outdoor restaurant seating.1,2,3 In Europe, we see yet further expansion of already bike-friendly streets in cities like Paris and Rome.2
The pandemic has forced us out of our private enclosures and into the perceptual fields of others, such that we become part and parcel of others’ experiences of navigating their built environments—allowing for accidental sightings, for serendipitous encounters, and a sense of coexisting within a shared locality even more so than before the pandemic. The seemingly small changes of widening sidewalks and establishing makeshift bike lanes where they were previously absent serve to illustrate what is possible when urban design priorities shift to accommodate humans before cars, to expand the public milieu and excise from the private, in doing so mitigating time spent in hyper-private, hyper-individualized spaces that predispose to loneliness.4
If we choose to depart from notions of individual ownership of space, we embrace collective enjoyment of and responsibility for space. To counteract loneliness is to feel connected not only with the urban spaces one occupies, but also and especially with the other humans and beings who roam it. By contrast, private ownership of lands and structures are inherently exclusionary constructs of capitalism, imperialism, and the hyper-individualism these precipitate—and thus can serve as drivers of loneliness and mood disorders.5 As a society, we have made great strides in recent years to embrace social efforts that seek to dismantle stigma around mental illness. Similarly, we must also embrace a realistic understanding of structural, spatial, and architectural determinants of mental health—one that recognizes place as inextricable from self and calls for reforming the place in pursuit of the well-being of the self. Place shapes identity, priorities, relationships, and politics. Where a person lives becomes part of who they are.
What remains to be seen is whether municipalities will continue the inadvertently humanistic urban interventions that they hurriedly implemented for infection prevention, beyond the period necessitated by the pandemic. That it required circumstances as extreme as a pandemic—no less than a global emergency—for some cities to expand public space for safe communal gathering is telling of the urban design priorities of those city governments. It raises the question of how long it would have taken these cities to improve their urban environments in ways that encourage active transportation, walkability, and belongingness, if not for a pandemic.
Urban designers, researchers, and activists ingratiated with municipal policymakers can leverage the rapid implementation of these built environment modifications as opportunities for evaluation, with the period immediately prior to the urban design intervention serving as a sort of epidemiological counterfactual. A battery of outcomes may be of interest in assessing an urban environmental modification, including characteristics of the environment itself and the effects of those characteristics on the mental and physical wellbeing of people,6 as well as potential changes elicited in human use of the urban space. For example, in the United States, the city of Philadelphia has alone seen a 150% increase in cycling among its residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.3 Other useful measures of impact can include greenspace use and perceived accessibility,7 given the well-documented benefits of access to nature and greenspace on mental and physical health.8
Of the myriad lessons that will be learned from COVID-19 across functional domains and societal institutions, some will lead to permanent, fundamental shifts in the operations and design of those institutions. The expansion of urban public space brought about as a necessity of infection prevention can yield great benefits to municipalities and their inhabitants, by operationalizing the built environment in ways that protect against loneliness and facilitate communal gathering in a time when this has been proven and recognized as essential to maintaining mental and psychosocial health.
About the Author
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Kavya Anchuri is an MD candidate at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine in Alberta, Canada. She holds a Master of Health Science with a concentration in public mental health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she conducted her thesis research on the epidemiology of suicide among emerging adults in the U.S. After this, she worked for the Nova Scotia Health Authority in Atlantic Canada to design a mental health systems program evaluation. Kavya’s research and practice interests seek to understand, articulate, and operationalize the structural, geographic, environmental, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical determinants of human and ecological health.
@kavya1195 |
References
References
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bike-lanes-covid-pandemic-canada-1.5598164
- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/covid-19-made-cities-more-bike-friendly-here-s-how-to-keep-them-that-way/
- https://www.wri.org/blog/2020/04/coronavirus-biking-critical-in-cities
- Heu LC, van Zomeren M, Hansen N. Lonely alone or lonely together? A Cultural-psychological examination of individualism–Collectivism and loneliness in five European countries. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 2019 May;45(5):780-93.
- Prins SJ, Bates LM, Keyes KM, Muntaner C. Anxious? Depressed? You might be suffering from capitalism: contradictory class locations and the prevalence of depression and anxiety in the USA. Sociology of health & illness. 2015 Nov;37(8):1352-72.
- Negami HR, Mazumder R, Reardon M, Ellard CG. Field analysis of psychological effects of urban design: a case study in Vancouver. Cities & health. 2018 Nov 30;2(2):106-15.
- Jones A, Hillsdon M, Coombes E. Greenspace access, use, and physical activity: Understanding the effects of area deprivation. Preventive medicine. 2009 Dec 1;49(6):500-5.
- Slater SJ, Christiana RW, Gustat J. Recommendations for Keeping Parks and Green Space Accessible for Mental and Physical Health During COVID-19 and Other Pandemics. Preventing chronic disease. 2020 Jul 9;17:E59.