Space, Structures and Design in a Post-Pandemic World

Thomas Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000572155
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Pandemics have long-term effects on how we live and work, and the COVID-19 pandemic was no exception, accelerating us into a digital economy, in which people increasingly work, shop, and learn online, transforming how we use space in-person and remotely. Space, Structures, and Design in a Post-Pandemic World explores the rebalancing of our physical and digital interactions and what it means for the built environment going forward.

This book examines the effect of the pandemic on our use of land, interior space, energy, and transportation, as well as on our approach to design, wealth, work, and practice. Author Thomas Fisher also discusses the plagues of institutional racism and climate change that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and how these were interrelated. At the same time as all of this, the automation of all or part of many jobs continued unabated, eliminating much of the work that people did before COVID-19 arrived. This text discusses how we might leverage the under-utilized human talent and material assets all around us to rebuild our communities and our economy in more creative ways for a more equitable, resilient future.

Space, Structures, and Design in a Post-Pandemic World will influence anyone interested in how design thinking can transform how we see the world and those looking for new ways to understand what the COVID-19 pandemic means and what opportunities it creates for our environments.

PART 1 POST-PANDEMIC CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

1 SPACE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198192-2

Every pandemic affects how we use – and view – physical space. In the wake of the Black Death in Europe, cities developed a new appreciation of the spatial location of dead bodies and with that came the emergence of cemeteries, often at the outskirts of the city, and the eventual end of the practice of burying people in backyards or under the floor of churches in cities.¹ During that medieval plague, there also arose a new-found appreciation of social distancing. The quarantine island – Poveglia – in the Venice lagoon, for example, was a place where sailors and their goods had to stay for weeks to ensure they were not carrying disease, before they were allowed into the city itself.²

A different set of spatial practices emerged in the mid-19th century in the wake of the cholera pandemics that occurred around the world at various times during that era. Prior to that pandemic, people often viewed cities as large versions of small towns and rural villages, with outhouses in backyards and slop sinks emptied into the streets. But the large number of deaths that resulted from waterborne cholera bacteria led cities to change their spatial and infrastructural practices.³ Sanitary sewers and indoor plumbing became a pervasive part of urban life, with later zoning and building codes requiring them in all new developments. That shift, in part because of cholera, enabled cities to become larger and denser as more people could live more safely, closer together and in taller buildings, without having to use backyard latrines.

Figure 1.1 “Poveglia,” a quarantine island in Venice, Italy.

That water infrastructure especially benefited poorer people, who more often lived in housing that lacked indoor plumbing. With it came a host of other benefits related to urban density, such as more employment opportunities, higher productivity, and greater access to services, as well as downsides, such as higher housing costs, more congestion, and greater pollution.⁴ Pandemics, in other words, have both good and bad long-term consequences. These events rapidly accelerate us into the future as technologies and systems that may have been present but marginal before the infection become dominant afterward, permanently altering our lives.

That acceleration happened again after the 1918 flu pandemic. The influenza virus spread so widely and so fast, in part, because of the crowded housing, streets, and trolleys of large cities, whose density had been at least partly enabled by the water infrastructure put in place after the previous pandemic. As a respiratory illness, the post-World-War-I flu pandemic prompted people to wear masks, avoid public places, and remain socially distanced, akin to what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.⁵ But the spatial impact of that after 1918 differed from what we recently experienced.

Figure 1.2 St. Louis Red Cross emergency corps, 1918 influenza epidemic.

The 1918 flu pandemic helped spur a desire on the part of many people to socially distance permanently and move away from dense cities, accelerating the suburbanization that would dominate the rest of the century.⁶ While the automobile and single-family housing existed prior to the 1918 pandemic, what had been largely the privilege of the well-to-do before World War I – automobiles and large-lot houses – became much more widespread after the pandemic. Banking reforms and new financing mechanisms that arose in the 1920s and 1930s further fueled the ability of many people to afford cars and stand-alone houses.

Meanwhile zoning codes became far more prescriptive, especially after the 1926 Supreme Court decision – Village of Euclid versus Ambler Realty – that supported the right of local governments to determine land use in their communities.⁷ Zoning codes that initially focused on building setbacks to ensure that streets received sufficient daylight, in the case of New York City, or on separating industrial uses from all other activities, in the case of Los Angeles, evolved into regulatory documents that specified land uses, building locations, and unit sizes. The common practice of requiring six-foot-wide side yard setbacks even recalled the social distancing recommendations of the 1918 pandemic.

As happened after the 19th-century cholera pandemics, this shift in the 20th century toward lower-density, socially distanced living had both good and bad effects. On one hand, home ownership, especially after World War II, became more affordable to a much larger portion of the population. On the other hand, it led to white flight, racial covenants, red lining, and other means of segregating the American population by race, religion, income, and class.⁸ The change in our use and perception of physical space after a pandemic seems to depend, in part, upon the nature and cause of the illness. Bacterial infections tend to prompt shifts in the nature and location of buried infrastructure, while viral infections appear to affect our behavior in social spaces more.

It may be too early to know precisely how our use of space will change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but we can already see some of its impact, following a similar course to the previous pandemics. For example, mobile digital technology and the Internet existed prior to 2020, as did their use in enabling growing numbers of people to work from home, shop online, and learn at a distance. But the recent pandemic made that technology and those practices a dominant way in which many people worked, shopped, and learned during the pandemic.⁹ COVID-19, in other words, forced a rebalancing of the digital and physical environment in a matter of days or weeks, accelerating us rapidly into a future that otherwise might have taken years or even decades to evolve.

Not everyone benefited from that acceleration. Less affluent families, unable to afford wide-bandwidth access to the Internet, and households in remote locations, where such connectivity is not even available, found it difficult to access classrooms, workplaces, or goods and services.¹⁰ We often see the gaps between urban and remote rural locations as somehow different from those that exist between the white population and communities of color in cities, but the inequities that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic showed how much those otherwise quite diverse communities, in very different locations, have in common. Pandemics do not just accelerate us into the future; they exacerbate inequalities and also highlight opportunities and potential alliances in the present.

The COVID-19 pandemic broke us of old spatial practices as well. Prior to the pandemic, most of us thought that to do something, we had to go somewhere: to an office or factory in order to work, to a store or mall in order to shop, or to a classroom or lecture hall in order to learn. Ironically, that reflected assumptions established during the previous post-pandemic era, when, after 1918, we began to organize cities, suburbs, and small towns into single-use zoning districts that required us to drive from one to the other over the course of a day. Although the digital technology existed to free us from such constant commuting for at least a couple of decades prior to 2020, it took the pandemic to reveal that potential.

Still, old habits take a long time to die and the assumptions that shaped our built environment may take a long time to change, in part because of the sunk cost we have in the way things are. We saw this happen in previous pandemics as well. Despite the widespread embrace of sanitary sewers and indoor plumbing after the 19th-century cholera pandemics, parts of cities and especially more remote rural locations continued to have outdoor latrines for some time.¹¹ And despite the desire to socially distance after the 1918 flu pandemic, many people continued to live, not out of choice, in overcrowded tenements for much of the last century. In hindsight, we might wonder why we continue to hold on to such old spatial practices, but prior to the change in thinking that comes with pandemics, it can seem hard to imagine the world any other way.

Pandemics, though, do not just disrupt our previous assumptions: they also give us greater choice in how to live our lives. That greater choice does not necessarily eliminate what existed before: we can still find outhouses in remote locations in the U.S., for instance, despite the prevalence of indoor plumbing, and we still have high-density housing and heavily used transit despite the prevalence of car-oriented suburbs. The same will no doubt happen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers have already returned to offices, shoppers to stores, and students and teachers to classrooms, but the ability to telework, shop online, and distantly learn will, from now on, remain a viable, and for some, a more desirable option. Most of us – and rightfully, all of us – now have a choice in terms of what we do in physical or digital space.

The Built Environment’s Digital Challenge

That presents a challenge – and an opportunity – for the built environment. Offices, stores, and schools as well as myriad other building types – factories, malls, theaters, stadiums, and the like – still have important roles to play, but owners of and tenants in those facilities will have to compete for our attention and our attendance, as we learned how to do almost everything remotely during the pandemic. Having the choice of whether or not to appear in person or via a digital platform means that those responsible for the built environment – from the owners of buildings to those who design, finance, construct, and operate them – will have to think in terms of what physical space can do that the online world cannot, what interactions and experiences can only happen in person, and for what reasons. While pandemics affect the health of the human population in the short term, they affect the built environment for decades afterward.

The sorting out of what gets done in person or remotely will certainly affect the amount and type of built space we need, something that was also an issue in previous pandemics. In the wake of the Black Death, with its dramatic toll on urban populations, cities had an excessive amount of empty buildings, which were eventually demolished, creating large open spaces in cities that anticipated the idea that green space could exist not just outside cities but within them as well.¹² The public-health implications of pandemics, in other words, go beyond epidemiology to include a renewed attention to the quality of our lives and the health-related aspects of the physical environment.

Likewise, the 19th-century cholera pandemics forced governments to confront the large number of outhouses and massive amount of horse manure in the streets, all of which could contaminate water supplies, a connection first recognized by Dr. John Snow in his famous mapping of the cholera cases caused by the Broad Street pump during London’s 1854 outbreak.¹³ In addition to the water-related infrastructure that this prompted in cities around the world starting in the latter half of the 19th century, cholera led to the paving of streets to allow for easier cleaning of them, and the provision of public baths, for those who did not have access to indoor plumbing.¹⁴

Figure 1.3 John Snow’s Broad Street Pump map.

The amount and density of built space also became an issue after the 20th-century flu pandemic. In industrial cities, with people living near where they worked, densely packed apartment buildings and trolley cars enabled the rapid spread of airborne viruses.¹⁵ That experience helped prompt building codes that prescribed health-related regulations, such as occupant numbers, ventilation rates, and fire-egress routes. The period after the 1918 flu pandemic also saw a significant expansion in the frequency and size of single-family residential districts and in the accommodation of private automobiles, which became the default transportation mode in the most developed countries.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we face such issues again. As in previous pandemics, people fled cities to more isolated rural locations as the COVID-19 virus spread, constituting a form of geographical distancing.¹⁶ But despite such initial urban flight, people in the past have always returned to cities because of the role such settlements play both economically and culturally.¹⁷ The question we now face is: Will our acceleration into the digital age still follow that history? Will the fact that many people can now work, shop, and learn from almost anywhere affect the rapid urbanization that has been happening around the world? When offered more choice in where we can now live, in other words, what will we decide?

It will undoubtedly take decades before we know the answer to that question. But in terms of physical space, one response to it already seems clear. Whether people occupy smaller cities and towns as remote workers or continue to occupy cities and suburbs as metropolitan residents, all will have the benefit of an extraordinary abundance of excess built space. Communities that have suffered from decline and depopulation over the last several decades already have empty storefronts and vacant land, but in the wake of the COVID-1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Part 1 Post-Pandemic Challenges and Opportunities
• Part 2 Post-Pandemic Functions and Facilities
• Part 3 Post-Pandemic Infrastructure and Open Space
• Figure Credits
• Index