by Julie Fitzpatrick
During the last edition of the CenterPiece, we highlighted the Designing for Distance (D4D) project whose idea came out of PDC’s COVID-19 Recovery and Resiliency Task Force, Public Space Working Group. PDC had an existing grant agreement with Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission (PHMC) to develop a Design Guidelines handbook, but when COVID hit, it became evident that there was an opportunity to develop something that could be more responsive to the needs of the communities, and the Designing for Distance project was born.
The basic premise was to develop design-based solutions to specific social distancing-related challenges affecting the public realm. Recognizing that sometimes a picture speaks a thousand words, the goal of the Designing for Distance program was to provide municipal leaders and the community revitalization organizations with practical design and planning solutions and accompanying implementation strategies to help their businesses and communities adapt to the difficult circumstances created by COVID-19.
Being a Certified Local Government (CLG), Reading immediately qualified to be one of four pilot communities for this project. The Reading Downtown Improvement District Authority and the City of Reading got to work with their consultant, Navarro & Wright Consulting Engineers, Inc. to bring creativity and resourcefulness to the community during the pilot project’s condensed working period.
Although things have begun to open up, and life is beginning to get back to “normal”, we anticipate that life will be different, and many of these concepts will be relevant and applicable into the future as we are trying to navigate the next few months and years. Each community project was very different, and the focus for Reading is on developing a strategy for safe gathering and social distancing along the Penn Street corridor between 4th and 9th Street where many events have traditionally taken place in the past. The other areas of focus are located in three courtyards along Penn Street, bringing a renewed vitality and energy to these public spaces. Our hope is that some of the concepts and design ideas will be implemented either prior to September or incorporated into the conference for participants to experience.
The plan involves:
Identified public parking areas, walking routes visitors would take from their car to the event, and timing of activities are incorporated into the concepts, maintaining social/physical distancing.
Each plan contains a matrix of dots that outline the total maximum number of how many people can be within a general block of area in the downtown for each event at any given time, and arrows providing a guided flow of movement. Each dot is spaced exactly six feet apart for the recommended social distancing requirement. Although social/physical distancing may no longer be recommended, the system provides a template that could easily be adapted for general crowd control and guided ease of movement for event attendees after a pandemic.
Fire and Ice Festival is typically the largest event, which was used as the example to include elements such as food truck design and a sequence for flow of people waiting at the food truck lines, a warming tent tunnel, improvements to the courtyard plaza spaces, and added interactive murals/digital screens.