How Cities Can Create Safer Spaces for Businesses to Reopen

Cities can and should play a role in creating safe public spaces and supporting local businesses, according to new plans from Studio One Eleven. The Los Angeles-based design firm recommends that cities adapt outdoor areas and parking into spaces for consumers to engage in commerce from a distance, and therefore support businesses. These spaces would include the creation of temporary parklets, curbside parking and flex areas.

“The city has an opportunity to reposition some spaces to allow businesses to recover,” Alan Pullman, a principal at Studio One Eleven, tells GlobeSt.com. “For example, cities control street side parking, and dedicated 5-to-10 minute customer pick-up zones can be really critical to a businesses survival. Having more designated more curbside pick-up zones is really important, and the city can facilitate that by restriping and taking out or re-signing meters.”

Initially, curbside parking will be crucial to keeping businesses open. Most businesses will be required to go through a curbside-pick-up phase of re-opening. In later phases, parklets and flex zones will play an important role. Parklets would be used for outdoor dining—areas where tables could be spread out—and places to congregate. They can also be extensions of clothing boutiques, where merchandise can be spread out so that customers can shop without the pressure of a crowded store. Flex zones, on the other hand, would be a lighter version of a parklet, created by roping off existing open spaces, like traffic medians, crosswalks, and side streets, all of which are much less trafficked under social distancing restrictions.

Each of these spaces could be created easily, quickly and for little cost. “We advocate lightweight, inexpensive and temporary measures. That could include putting down spray chalk, covering meters with signs or using temporary cones to create curbside pick-up areas and additional outdoor dining spaces,” says Pullman. “Those are incremental and are not necessarily permanent. They are also easy to adjust once you get feedback. These are small experiments to see what you can do without a lot of money to see what works and then adjust as required.”

This concept is in its early stages, but local city governments globally are looking at ways to reconfigure public spaces to adapt to the pandemic. “There has been a worldwide trend to look at reconfiguring public space that cities control to address some of the health and safety concerns,” says Pullman. “That includes creating more open space for city dwellers that really don’t have a lot of open space in their apartments to quarantine, slowing traffic to make it easier for pedestrians and bicyclists or repositioning spaces for outdoor dining. I have seen a lot of cities talking about doing these things.”

Open spaces will play an important role in the transition back to normal like, according to Pullman. People feel more comfortable outside where there is more space. “Businesses are looking to survive, and to do that, we need customers to be comfortable coming back out again,” he adds. “They need to feel safe to come back out to shop or dine. We are trying to find where those spaces can happen.”

As of now, Pullman says that it is too early to tell if any of these steps will become permanent changes in the retail landscape—however, it is a possibility. “It is hard to make predictions about how this will change things, but it could lead to an era of people being more local and shopping locally,” he says. “That could help local main streets to recover through the pandemic. Those could become permanent changes, and potentially a nice outcome to all of this.”