TY - JOUR AU - Mehaffy, Michael West AU - Haas, Tigran AU - Elmlund, Peter PY - 2020/11/30 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - What Still Matters in a City: The COVID-19 Pandemic Offers a “Teachable Moment” Illustrating that Public Spaces Must Simultaneously Connect us, and Protect us too JF - The Journal of Public Space JA - jps VL - 5 IS - 3 SE - Space DO - 10.32891/jps.v5i3.1378 UR - https://www.journalpublicspace.org/index.php/jps/article/view/1378 SP - 31-38 AB - <p>Various commentators have sought to assess the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban form and public space, with predictions ranging from “the end of urban density,” to a new impetus for auto-encapsulated sprawl, to exacerbation of the effects of urban inequality, to an explosion of digital surveillance, to a return to relative normalcy with new protective strategies. Here we tease out a more basic lesson about public space: that it is far from one amorphous thing, but it has both connective and protective characteristics. Its structure has a profound impact upon the life of the city and the health and well-being of its residents. Furthermore, it is up to us, as practitioners at the interface of science and policy, to chart the very real choices emerging for a better generation of public space and urban form.</p> ER -