This book considers the implications of the emerging post-pandemic reality for public space and the built environment. It addresses changes to our cities, parks, neighborhoods, transportation modes, schools, streetscapes, cultural spaces, and engineering systems present in each of these. The chapters’ broad topics include public space and the built environment; tactical urbanism and temporality; designing built environments and hybrid remote spaces; engaging community and participation; connection with nature for mental health and wellness; the future of post pandemic space; and disaster preparedness. Recurring themes are design flexibility, repurposed cities, building standards, virtual connectedness, environmental vigilance, refocus on wellness and green space, gender perspectives, and community organization. It will be an important reference work for researchers, students and practitioners.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. How can we design, develop and adapt urban environments to better meet the needs and aspirations of an increasingly diverse ageing population? This edited collection offers a new approach to understanding the opportunities and challenges of creating ‘age-friendly’ communities in the context of urban change. Drawing together insights from leading voices across a range of disciplines, the book emphasises the urgent need to address inequalities that shape the experience of ageing in urban environments. The book combines a focus on social justice, equity, diversity and co-production to enhance urban life. Exploring a range of age-friendly community projects, contributors demonstrate that, despite structural obstacles, meaningful social change is achievable at a local level.

Presenting key examples and case studies of how design has responded to the pandemic, Design and Covid-19 offers lessons and approaches to design for future resilience. Design has a key role to play in not only creating products to ensure safety from the pandemic, but also in the creation of complex systems, new technologies and physical environments that enable us to carry out our lives and protect populations in the future. Design and Covid-19 identifies four key phases of the pandemic to examine how designers developed systems, services, communications and products as part of our response to the crisis, whether at an international, national or community level. Contributors report from a range of international contexts, including countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia, detailing how countries responded to the pandemic, introduced social distancing and lockdowns, developed test, track and trace systems, implemented new laws and how design and designers responded to the urgent new challenges that the pandemic created. They explore the adaptation of designs as communities searched for new ways of connecting and working through restrictions and social distancing measures, establishing local mutual aid groups and using social media to support each other through the pandemic, and go on to focus on recovery and resilience, analysing the deeper, systemic design response as industries emerge from lockdown. They explore the need to reflect on and investigate key issues in order to understand what we can learn personally, socially, economically and globally from this unprecedented crisis. Drawing upon the expertise of scholars from across the globe, Design and Covid-19 explores a wide range of design disciplines to address the complex societal and global issues highlighted throughout the pandemic, and to inform new ways of building human and planetary wellbeing.

How do we accommodate a growing urban population in a way that is sustainable, equitable, and inviting? This question is becoming increasingly urgent to answer as we face diminishing fossil-fuel resources and the effects of a changing climate while global cities continue to compete to be the most vibrant centers of culture, knowledge, and finance. Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the 1960s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people. But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure—vital to cities for getting from place to place, or staying in place—for human use? Studying city life and understanding the factors that encourage or discourage use is the key to designing inviting public space. In How to Study Public Life Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre draw from their combined experience of over 50 years to provide a history of public-life study as well as methods and tools necessary to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized urban planning for having forgotten life in the city. City life studies provide knowledge about human behavior in the built environment in an attempt to put it on an equal footing with knowledge about urban elements such as buildings and transport systems. Studies can be used as input in the decision-making process, as part of overall planning, or in designing individual projects such as streets, squares or parks. The original goal is still the goal today: to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. Anyone interested in improving city life will find inspiration, tools, and examples in this invaluable guide.