A Historical Reflection of Post-Pandemic Mixed-Use Architecture - What's Next?

Authors: Yvette Jansco, Christine Weber Craik, Arezoo Talebzadeh, Desiree Geib and Amber Meleskie; The Kasian Mixed-Use Task Force

It has been over a hundred years since the world has experienced a pandemic event as pervasive as Covid-19, with the power to quickly transform how we live, how we work, and how we move through our day-to-day lives. “Stay Home, Save Lives”, and "Less Faces, Open Spaces" ae sayings that, not so long ago, were completely unfamiliar. The impact of these words has been profound.

We have changed. 

Change to Societal Norms

As individuals, we are facing an unprecedented shift in our lives and ability to inhabit the world around us. In the immediate and short term, we have managed to forge together a functioning economy. However, the current physical form of the built environment no longer reflects the rapidly emerging functions they need to perform to support our needs. It is our opportunity - now - to create the future we imagine. We will not return “back to normal”, but rather, “ahead to normal”. Refocusing on supporting local economies and shortening supply chains will be essential. When we interact, finding a balance between virtual and face-to-face interaction will be one of the key drivers of how we change the built environment. Lastly, we need to transition to a new understanding of what is private, public and community, and our comfort levels in each sphere. As designers and architects, our role is to understand and execute these changes based on targeted conceptualization of a complex combination of functional, social and economic issues. We can reevaluate what may have been lost, decide its value, and craft a new response. 

Watching change in real time

Most peculiar about this pandemic has been the ability to see in to our ‘future’, in the ever changing present. Areas hit by the virus at later dates, were able to see their future in real and frightening time, in areas hit in the first wave. So where does this leave us? First and foremost, we should see this an opportunity to harness the power of this virus to create change.  

How successfully this will work, depends both on the clinical and functional pathogenic safety of the physical environments we create and reimagine, as well as the perception reflected to us of safety, refuge, and security. Environments need to ease our mostly shared concerns, real and imagined. How successfully we bring people back together largely depends on careful crafting of spaces, helping people to be and feel safe at both at the intimate and urban scale. We will increasingly seek safety and security in places with live work and play in a world of uncertainty. 

‘So long as millions believe that to be within six or seven feet of another person is to exhibit a death wish – nothing can be normal. Instead of feeling comfortable sitting or standing next to someone on a train, tube or bus, or at the bar of a pub or the counter of a café, we have been convinced that everyone else is effectively a biological weapon to be deployed against us.”

 Simon Heffer, The Telegraph

As designers, we need to understand that this is the foundation informing our design solutions for the foreseeable future. How exactly we will shape and inform interior design, architecture, urban design and planning for the pandemic and post-pandemic is difficult to predict. However, we can draw inspiration from historians and look to the past, and futurists who look at our collective unmet needs and potential. By following and making reasonable assumptions as to what will succeed each action or inaction, we can reasonably forecast what might be next by following the direction happening now. The only thing we know for sure is that every preceding major epidemic event in our human history has had aftereffects.

Looking Back

How do we know the built environment will change? It is not the first time that we have encountered a health crisis which has transformed the built form and the ideology behind it. Throughout history, we can see how major societal and political changes to housing policy and the built environment happened during similar pandemic and health events.

The Plague

The plagues of the 1350’s and 1600’s were arguably responsible for the chain of events that first eliminated the feudal system of land management, and subsequently created a stratification of socioeconomic class. Power shifted from landowners to increasingly scarce labor resources in the 1350’s, while multinational economies shifted in the 1600’s. Suddenly, workers were paid increasingly fair wages, class disparity lessened, layers of socioeconomic class created, leading to changes in family housing and community planning each time.

Spanish Flu

The 1918 pandemic threatened the health and the financial interests of both workers and the commercial and industrial elite. It forced them to analyze the connection between disease and sanitation, social policy and economic stability. This, in turn, encouraged regulation and oversight in the built environment and city planning. 

Tuberculosis

Many of the aesthetics and physical form of modernist structures, beginning in the 1920’s, were guided and influenced by health protocols surrounding tuberculosis. Flat roofs, areas for sun exposure, wide open spaces and simple formed structures with clean lines prevailed in lieu of the cramped Victorian slums. Access to light, sun and air, with views to nature and open space, were the features of the day. Health concerns had a significant impact on influencing and directing physical form. 

SARS

A more recent health-crisis-induced shift includes SARS in 2002, and its exponential increase in e-commerce. This year, there is a 129% year-over-year growth in U.S. & Canadian e-commerce orders as of April 21 and, remarkably, 146% growth in all online retail orders. This will affect how we deliver and receive products, coordinate, and secure receivables - especially in multi-family and mixed-use developments. It will also alter the retail real estate market. The 2020 pandemic is adding fuel to the fire.

Technological acceleration

Another notable similarity between 1918 and 2020, includes an acceleration of technological change: back then it was automobiles, radio, industrialization, and electricity. These innovations helped to form much of what our mobile culture looks like today. Today, it is an acceleration of hyper-connectivity, internet, smartphones, teleconferencing, 5G, robotics and artificial intelligence. It is reasonable to conclude that as the acceptance of technological acceleration persisted in the past post pandemic state, so it will persist and continue today.

Looking to the Future – Post-COVID19

Looking ahead, what are the experts saying about our future? There will be major transformations in the way we live, work, and do business. Our spaces will adapt alongside this transformation. It is our role as city builders, architects, and designers to understand and direct this change.  

Buying local

In the absence of simplification and stabilization of international supply chains, we need to focus on buying local and sourcing labour and supply wherever possible. Supporting local farmers, for example, is not as simple as purchasing from a local market. All the infrastructure from field to table needs to be reinforced through investment and development to support them. This will impact size, shape, quality, location, and character of our homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces, agri-business and industrial property moving forward. Local infrastructure will need to expand and diversify, to support a wider supply and broader market sector representation. By doing this we both respond to a growing demand as well as a need to be self-sustaining. 

Virtual interpersonal communication

Virtual meetings have quickly become an acceptable advance forward because they are easy to coordinate and efficient. This advance will persist because of the many perceived benefits including reduction of flight travel, elimination of commutes, and the benefit of including the best people, not just the available people. This change is not unique to the business world. Similar changes are happening in education, with a wider societal acceptance of virtual learning, and a new need for spaces in or near the home to learn remotely. Virtual meeting spaces of all sizes, public and private, could be nestled within residential, mixed-use, and suburban neighbourhoods, occupying a variety of underutilized and reimagined spaces.

Changing constructs of public-private-community

Thirdly, we need to be able to successfully transition people between public, private and their broader community. The need for personal space needs to be balanced with participation in the public realm. There could be growing fear of a surveillance state with the advent of things like contact tracing; and a subsequent desire for privacy and intimacy that has been lost. If your health depended on it, would you share your data willingly? That raises the question as to whether privacy is just a cultural construct. Nevertheless, this may create a need for refuge, a craving for privacy that, moving forward, may become increasingly rare. We will find there is a tipping point at which we are not willing to publicly offer more of ourselves and our data, in exchange for societal engagement and participation in urban infrastructure.

What does this mean for the built environment?

We cannot simply cease to engage in the public realm: interaction, gathering, sharing, and creating are what make us human. Translating that need three-dimensionally, defining spatial relationships as we manifest functional, creative, and novel architectural relationships. It may include, for example, a growing desire for protective enclaves to balance open plan space, and the transitions between. How we physically separate ourselves while we are active in the public realm will take on a different scale and idea around a sense of refuge. Changed behaviors mean changed function, which therefore should inform the shape, form and character of space.

Our world has slowed down. As we take a collective breath, it has been an opportunity to stop for a few months and process the unprecedented rate of change we are experiencing now. Different kinds of spaces we use, will see different kinds of changes. This is a unique and wonderful opportunity to express diversity through the building form.

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The Kasian Mixed-Use Task Force is a research collective dedicated to the pursuit of research, collaboration and thought leadership in the context of post-pandemic accelerated changes to the way we live and, by extension, the built environment.

Yvette Jancso is an Associate Architect with Kasian bringing over 25 years of experience in the fields of architecture and urban design.

Christine Craik is an Associate, Senior Interior Designer with Kasian. She has been in the design industry for over 20 years, specifically in senior living, multifamily, and geriatric healthcare design.

Arezoo Talebzadeh is a Senior Project Architect with Kasian, focusing on soundscape within the built environment.

Desiree Geib is a designer focusing on projects within the commercial sector at Kasian.