Managing the curb – Public space and use of curbside cafes during the Coronavirus pandemic

Urban streets, especially curbside spaces, are increasingly complex and often contested. The Coronavirus pandemic created a new demand for street space to enable physical distancing. The urgency of the pandemic and the fear of covid exposure suspended traditional community engagement opportunities, opposition from residents and business owners, and considerations over the privatization of public street space. This exploratory paper uses the case studies of Toronto and Chicago to trace the past and present regulations and programs affecting curbside parking spaces. Through these cases, this paper addresses larger questions that relate the historical conceptions around curbside parking use with those put forward in response to the pandemic. Given the popularity of pandemic-related curbside space programs and their potential to become long-term interventions, this paper also raises several questions around privatization, access and social equity that must be addressed in future iterations of programs affecting curbside space. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Understanding the capacities of urban street spaces by mapping Melbourne's parklets

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many parklets have been deployed onto kerbside carparking spaces throughout Melbourne, Australia, by street-fronting hospitality businesses, to provide socially-distanced outdoor dining spaces. These temporary parklets provide useful indicators of the varying capacities of urban streets to support street life and commercial activity. By examining the distribution of Melbourne's parklets, this paper identifies numerous urban design factors that provide capacity for parklets, or inhibit them. The analysis shows parklets thrive on traditional, pedestrian-friendly shopping streets with narrow frontages and good access but low through-traffic. Car-dependent outer-suburban shopping streets and strip shopping centres also support numerous parklets. Key hindrances include commercial streets serving as arterial commuter routes and streets that already have extensive traffic-calming features. Minor side streets can provide parklet capacity, but many design conditions inhibit this. The paper challenges policy-makers, planners and designers to address a variety of impediments to creating more pedestrian-friendly street environments. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Learning to Share: Outdoor Commercial Spaces on San Francisco's Valencia Street

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of San Francisco sanctioned the use of public space on sidewalks and parking spaces for commercial use as part of their Shared Spaces initiative. Combined with streamlined permitting processes and an iterative rollout of design guidelines and inspections, the program facilitated a rapid and large-scale shift in the city’s streetscape. Using the Valencia Street commercial corridor in San Francisco’s Mission District as a case study area, we define and observe the “outdoor commercial spaces” (OCS) to present a preliminary typology based on degree of enclosure as a potential signifier of different patterns in use and perception of public space. We interview residents and other stakeholders to explore emerging themes in the perception of OCS, complemented by pedestrian path tracing along different sections of Valencia Street. Our findings indicate that differences in the degree of enclosure in OCS on Valencia Street partially reflect their diversity in use and business type. The limited interview data also suggests that individuals across all stakeholder groups generally believe OCS represent an improvement to public space even when more enclosed OCS imply the privatization of public space. Additionally, pedestrian behavior while the street is closed to vehicular traffic implies that the street closure is an important complement to OCS that maximizes the potential benefits of an activated streetscape while mitigating the negative effects and perceptions of privatization. However, these changes may amplify existing patterns of inclusion and exclusion in public spaces on Valencia Street. Especially as many OCS may become permanent fixtures of San Francisco’s streets, their design and purpose have important implications for street-level accessibility and city-wide equity for small businesses. These dynamics –and the OCS themselves –are likely to continue evolving during the transition to long-term guidelines and implementation.

Outdoor Terraces in Barcelona and Milan: Configuration of New Spaces for Social Interaction

This work approaches the phenomenon of the outdoor terraces of bars and restaurants, analysing the role of these privately owned collective elements whose layout has shaped the urban landscape at the pavement level for more than a century, and whose presence has become essential in the streets of many cities after a pandemic. The research highlights the interest of terraces as dynamic elements of urbanity: private domains in the public space where people eat collectively;they are apparently simple units that synthesise complex conflicts between individual behaviours and property boundary conditions. The investigation shows the increasing expansion that outdoor terraces have experienced since 2020, using the cities of Barcelona and Milan as case studies. A series of GIS maps show the image of both cities before and after the pandemic, allowing us to evaluate the amount of public space allocated to terraces, measure their increase in number and sur-face, establish the proportions of occupation of the street and find the patterns of concentration in the public space. Finally, the article offers some policy and planning recommendations based on the research findings. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.