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The pandemic has underlined how broken the UK’s model for urban development is. [...]
It is hard to see now amid the depression and anger, but the pandemic did briefly show cities acting on the basis of general human need: rough sleepers being housed, mutual aid groups being set up, evictions being suspended. Yet the possibility of any long-term change is rapidly being lost.
— The Guardian
Tribune culture editor Owen Hatherly's new housing opinion piece for The Guardian. View full entry
The pandemic accelerated a need for digital menu boards, artificial intelligence, expanding drive-thrus into dual lanes and adding drive-thru only units where available. Many other fast food restaurants like Wendy's, Taco Bell, Del Taco, Burger King, KFC and McDonald's have also shown interest in developing many of these concepts. — Construction Dive
With indoor dining areas closed in many, if not most, restaurants since the beginning of the pandemic, the nation's fast food and fast casual franchises are rethinking fundamental design concepts of their operations that will likely become part of the American vernacular for decades to come, such... View full entry
Certainly New Yorkers’ revaluation of the countryside had begun long before the “Decameron”-style outflows of remote-working urbanites and their families, fleeing the coronavirus last spring. [...] The phrase “farm to table” has been a cliché for years, and Park Slope idealists long ago exported their Marie Antoinette rural fantasies to the Hudson Valley. — The New York Times
With the coronavirus eating its way through America's hinterlands and the election unmasking a deeply entrenched urban-rural ideological divide, NYT art critic Jason Farago takes a second look at the Rem Koolhaas-starring exhibition Countryside, the Future which opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim... View full entry
[...] the European Union sees a chance to create a new common aesthetic born out of a need to renovate and construct more energy-efficient buildings.
The proposal for energy retrofits is part of the climate actions at the core of the EU’s 1.8 trillion euro ($2.1 trillion) coronavirus recovery plan and could result in a sweeping architectural makeover, one that leaders have compared to a new Bauhaus movement for the continent.
— Bloomberg
For Bloomberg CityLab, Kriston Capps and Laura Millan Lombrana contemplate how the European Union's bold $2.1 trillion coronavirus recovery plan, and its embedded measures to make buildings more energy-efficient, could shape architecture and urban design on much of the continent. A new Bauhaus... View full entry
Predicting the future of cities is risky, especially if one heeds the words of the American baseball legend, Yogi Berra, that “the future ain’t what it used to be”.
In the period since the start of the pandemic it might seem as if everything is different, but in the long term, I would suggest that rather than changing anything, it has merely hastened and magnified trends that were already apparent before the virus struck.
— The Guardian
In his opinion piece for The Guardian, architect Norman Foster ponders how current and past pandemics have influenced and will continue to shape the infrastructure, and subsequently culture, of our cities. Foster briefly touches on a number of trendy topics, including electric vehicles, ride... View full entry
What are architects and urban planners foreseeing as people cautiously gather? Streets “curated” for various uses and dynamic cityscapes that both advance wellness and knit communities together. [...]
Architects and other designers who have devoted efforts to creating public places that encourage gathering and sociability now say their task is to make congregating in these spaces possible again — and perhaps to achieve some community-enhancing goals in the process.
— The New York Times
Burger King has unveiled new restaurant designs that are due to better serve customers in a COVID-19 world. With a focus on mobile ordering and curbside pick-up, the new designs embrace a new way of serving visitors by offering drive-in and walk-up order areas, curbside pick-up areas, an enhanced... View full entry
A recent monthly report from the United States Census Bureau indicates that residential construction is beginning to claw back toward typical levels following steep drops in construction and permitting activities during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report states that... View full entry
It’s no coincidence that Covid-19 has disproportionately sickened and killed members of demographic groups — people who are black, Indigenous and Latino; who are homeless; who are immigrants — that have been targets of systemic segregation that increased their vulnerability. It’s also not hard to imagine the pandemic, and a person’s relative risk of infection, being used to justify new versions of these discriminatory practices. — NYT Magazine
Kim Tingley, spoke with Joel Sanders, Hansel Bauman, Mabel O. Wilson and other academics and designers about how architecture could adapt to address issues of public health and universal design in a post-COVID-19 world. More about MIXdesign's COVID Case Study here h/t @Justin Garrett Moore, AICP View full entry
Santa Fe Springs-based Studio Other has introduced a new collection of attachable privacy panels designed to offer dynamic flexibility for existing workstations as employers prepare to return to the physical office environment. The panels come in 18 different colors and six configurations and can... View full entry
