This piece was published on September 24, 2020 by Strong Towns. My co-author Leila Hakimizadeh AICP and I were working to understand how some changes brought by the pandemic may carry forward and may even be beneficial.

Photo by the author, captioned: People have morning coffee at the popular Baker & Commons cafe. Pandemic-related seating has helped to calm traffic on Elmwood's main street, College Avenue. More people working from home may improve business in the long term.

Elmwood is a fifteen-minute, tree-lined walk south of the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Centered on a two-block commercial street at the intersection of two-lane roads, Elmwood is filled with small apartment buildings, parks, and craftsman bungalows with flower-filled, water-efficient front yards. An irregular street grid links everything together, providing views east to a row of hills and west to San Francisco Bay. While not short of college students, the area is also a mix of families, retired people, rich, poor, and middle class. All these people show up in Elmwood’s restaurants, clothing stores, and coffee shops as well as the movie theater, ice cream shop, and grocery store. The area has a school and a library and even a small hospital. Elmwood is a neighborhood.

Neighborhoods have become rare in much of the United States. Andrés Duany once related a story about a conversation with someone who told him she was interested in protecting her neighborhood. “No, ma’am,” he replied, “you live in a subdivision.” Thus it is for most people outside core cities, in areas built after 1940, living in isolated, drive-to housing developments with legally-enforced segregation of housing types and with businesses congregated around arterials. This is sprawl, and among the many factors reinforcing it are zoning, traffic engineering, retail practices, and social discrimination. Suburban lifestyles and planning rules and practices have hollowed out older mixed-use neighborhoods through the economic disruption of big-box stores, displacement of children to mega-schools, and road enlargements.

Yet the last few decades have seen, if not the end of sprawl, at least a strong rejoinder. Many cities and their neighborhoods have sprung back to life after many years of official and unofficial neglect. Neighborhoods’ social, economic, and environmental advantages are being increasingly understood. COVID-19 is a worldwide tragedy and creates urban challenges, but it will not be the end of cities. We have been here before. By the time of the Black Death, London, Paris, Rome, Damascus, and Cairo had each been around for a millennium or more. All these cities are still with us and have thriving neighborhoods.

There will be longterm effects from this pandemic specific to neighborhood planning. Richard Florida, urban studies theorist, predicts that after the pandemic, we will continue to see 1 in 5 people working remotely. What will this mean for neighborhoods? How do planners, urban designers, officials, and developers create future neighborhoods to respond to the needs of tomorrow?

The Neighborhood Potential

The future life of cities lies in their neighborhoods. There will be more people around more of the time and people who will need even more from their neighborhoods than before. This is an incredible opportunity. In Elmwood, the restaurants are serving food to go and there are tables outside to dine with social distance, but once the pandemic is ended working from home will no longer mean just “from home.” Working remotely, we will go back to the cafes for a change of scenery, skip out for a long lunch at the corner restaurant, or go to the store to buy office supplies. The 24-hour neighborhood, with activity not only on nights and weekends, may once again be possible. Local amenities can flourish and the trend toward single-use neighborhoods serving single-use central business districts could reverse. The more we can walk for errands, the healthier and happier we and the planet will be. To meet the neighborhood potential, we should move forward in five ways:

1. Develop neighborhood plans with social justice and equity

The pandemic has deepened social and economic gaps between rich and poor neighborhoods in the US. Part of improving neighborhoods must be an effort to rid them of decades of social injustice and inequity. We should begin by acknowledging many professions’ culpability, embedded in long-standing practices like urban renewal, freeway location, and redlining. To create change in disadvantaged areas, from the beginning we must engage backbone local organizations to understand peoples’ needs and to embed equity and inclusion principles, such as PHEAL into neighborhood plans. We should invite communities to write anti-displacement policies with us. Chicago uses Equitable Transit Oriented Development to prioritize investments in communities of color. For example, in Washington Park, small creative incremental investments are attracting market interest to the community.

2. Practice placekeeping before placemaking

While we are working for positive change, we must recognize existing community patterns, public life, and the local ecosystem before neighborhood planning and placemaking. Placekeeping is preserving historic buildings and affordable housing and maintaining public spaces. It’s also protecting cultural identity, sense of place, and belonging. How a community decides to maintain their way of life might be different from how we as urban planners imagine it for them. Placemaking for neighborhoods of color should be an enhancement to how a community already uses their neighborhood and be based on data analysis and study of existing patterns to not disrupt the norms valued by residents. For example, Restore Oakland is a model for repairing long-lasting injustice, investing in economic opportunity, and restoring a vision for community safety.

3. Create new development compatible in built form, not density

To have enough users to support amenities like stores, parks, libraries, and public transit within walking distance, some neighborhoods will benefit from additional housing. However, new buildings much larger or different than existing ones can create fierce neighborhood opposition. In his recent book Missing Middle Housing, Dan Parolek recommends that planners and designers understand a neighborhood’s existing built form and scale before proposing new development. Moving away from measures like units per acre and minimum lot sizes toward a focus on compatible design will allow us to use the missing middle housing typologies that were common before the 1940s, changing the focus from density to urban form in conversations about land use planning, zoning, and housing.

4. Create accessible open spaces to gather and be outside

Local public space creates a place for people to get outside, exercise, and meet their neighbors. More workers staying at home will make high quality spaces within walking distance more valuable. Neighborhood parks will be essential and can also provide space for community gatherings and events. In Elmwood, Willard Park hosts movie nights and Easter egg hunts and is filled with sunbathers and picnics on any sunny day. Slow streets programs implemented near Elmwood and around the country during the pandemic could be made permanent to make low-traffic streets a part of each neighborhood.

The recent Black Lives Matter protests speak to longstanding exclusion and discrimination in our public open spaces. Access to parks and public spaces that connect people and welcome diversity and inclusion provides the foundation for community trust and sense of belonging. Well-designed and kept parks can reduce the isolation of people and communities, nurture community dialogue, and reconnect the frayed social fabric of neighborhoods caused both by sprawl and redlining. We should design our public spaces for coexistence and tolerance so that people of different backgrounds feel they belong.

5. Create “15-minute Cities”

The 15-minute city concept got new momentum with COVID-19. A 15-minute city provides access to food and services within walking and biking distances of all homes; contains a variety of housing types and level of affordability; includes green spaces for everyone to use; and gives multiple purposes to buildings. A 15-minute city allows places to better handle health, economic, and climate crises in all their forms, increasing neighborhood resilience and social interactions.

Walkable Main Streets like College Avenue in Elmwood have an important role in 15-minute cities. These streets will continue to provide community amenities in the future of vibrant and active neighborhoods and may see renewed activities and businesses. For the many single-use subdivisions built without commercial uses, walkable retail will be more difficult to achieve, but not impossible. We suggest the following two options, as a start:

Accessory Commercial Units

By loosening the restrictive zoning that has limited urban activities for the last century, we can create small businesses in our homes. “Accessory Commercial Units” (ACUs) in residential zoning districts can make space for small home-based businesses such as bakeries, juice shops, home-grown gardens, art studios, neighborhood cafes, and barbershops, visible from the street and engaging to pedestrians. ACUs can diversify and strengthen social life and economic fabric and allow entrepreneurship in disadvantaged neighborhoods. From these seeds, who knows what might grow? After all, Apple was started in a garage. Likewise, small back or front yard offices becoming popular during the pandemic are among the most sustainable ways to bring life to neighborhoods and fight climate change. These small spaces, often around 120 square feet, create a small work/life separation that many people need. They need not be as elegant as artist Kathryn Clark’s studio in Sonoma, but we can always dream.

Mobile Food Strategy

Mobile food facilities could be great additions to neighborhoods that lack walkable Main Streets and fixed-location restaurants. As temporary facilities, they provide a solution to food access and overcome uncertainties within the real estate industry and the expensive process of creating fixed locations. Unlike traditional food trucks, these super trucks provide the full range of possibilities, including food trailers, carts, pop-up shops, awnings, and kiosks. Mobile grocery facilities could also alleviate food deserts, as well, such as the Fresh Moves Mobile Market from Chicago.

Conclusion

While working from home is not an option for essential workers and many professions, more of us may be working from home in the future. Neighborhood cafes, restaurants and co-working facilities will flourish once the fear of the pandemic subsides, and local amenities like parks will see continued high levels of use. The pandemic isn’t going to change everything about the ways that we live and work. But our tightly-wound, stressed out, long-commute world might end up like the glimpse of home-bound life we’ve had in 2020, and more subdivisions might end up looking like Elmwood. If that means we pollute less, waste less time commuting, and know our neighbors and family better, this might be the start of something good.