Open Public Spaces – Design Guidelines for Resilient and Healthy Cities

The Corona Pandemic made it very clear that the city in which we live today, unexpectedly can no longer be used as we were used to. The “traditional” and long-accepted zoning and design of public spaces, such as squares, street spaces, parks or green spaces, has to be rethought, and adapted almost overnight. Distancing rules, quantity restrictions or behavior codes determine the new space usage and movement behavior in public spaces. It turns out that many places and situations are not designed for this new situation: Sidewalks are too narrow for the necessary distance, footprints in front of shops are too small, there is hardly any space between the parking spaces for the outdoor dining tables, which now must be further apart. Meanwhile, the wide lanes of car traffic are orphaned. Parks and green areas offer attractive employment opportunities in the fresh air with less risk of infection, but hardly manage to adequately distance groups of the permitted number of people from each other. The objective of the BMI-funded 'Nationale Stadtentwicklungspolitik'-project 'Open public space' is to analyze which potentials from current movement patterns and space usage in times of the pandemic can be used to create new open public spaces, streets and green spaces for resilient, liveable and walkable neighborhoods. Based on case studies and detailed image and movement data analysis, we analyze and create guidelines for urban design and public space design. The guidelines will be implemented in city centers, in a combination of digital and real-life designed tools, to create well-designed public spaces, which can be used by intuition and orientation, not by barriers and prohibition signs – and far beyond the pandemic. In the project, (geo) data and image specialists work together with scientists from the fields of urban planning and architecture, thereby creating an innovative and direct link and interaction between pattern analyzes of different data sources and practical scientific knowledge of urban planning and design. Various institutions are currently working on spatial science and planning issues relating to the corona epidemic . A broad-based derivation and development of design guidelines for public space from the systematic examination of image, video and tracking data with the aim of finding permanent solutions for cities worth living in, beyond the pandemic to research, however, is pending. The approach implements the question of what idea of a city we pursue - regarding the requirements for usage and movement behavior in public spaces upcoming now. Urban quality is based in particular on complexity, a high density of encounter and communication, as well as functional, social and cultural diversity – aspects that are being pushed back by the changing requirements, and which could be innovatively supported by “crisis-proof” design, with new approaches, concepts and instruments. Developing urban spaces that can synchronize “distant behavior” with the rich, complex, integrative idea of the city.