Design actions for open spaces in a global ongoing pandemic

The pandemic has spread in 2020 and has not ended yet. While in a first stage, where cities were empty, nature took over open spaces, in the medium term it has led to dramatic changes not just in our social behaviours but also in our built environment (Matthew & McDonald 2006). While cities were empty, scholars in the field of landscape design and urbanism started discussing how to (re)get along with nature, how to regulate social behaviours through landscape design, and should we design open spaces to make them accessible in different circumstances (Batty, 2020; Connolly, Ali, & Keil, 2020). In the first phase of the COVID-19, when the pandemic spread, there was a drastic reduction in the use of public open spaces (such as streets, parks and squares), as soon as the first wave ceased scholars started discussing possible urban transformations, envisioning, in the long or medium term, new social patterns and changes in the built environment. Moreover, during the lock-down, small urgent and needed physical adaptation of open spaces, permanent or temporary, have changed the way we live and move in our cities. Since then, due to the unprecedented changes in our social behaviours experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars, students and practitioners all over the world are increasingly discussing the relationship between survival of social life and adaptation of urban form and open spaces to the new distancing needs (Honey-Rosés, et al. 2020; Jon, I. 2020). Today, while the pandemic is going to start its fourth wave, changes, permanent or temporary, are more and more needed to make our cities different from the contemporary models, and adaptable to different scenarios. It has already been noticed that most of such transformations and design ideas on urban rarefaction were already ongoing, but they accelerated since the pandemic to adapt to new social patterns. Accordingly, this paper aims at discussing from a theoretical point of view the following questions: What are the future perspectives for the new role of open and green spaces in the urban context? How can we adapt social behaviours to the new post-pandemic social distancing needs through designing open spaces? How can we reconsider the design of open spaces related to public buildings by moving some functions from their inside to the outside, to better face further future restrictions in using public buildings? Moreover, through the comparison with projects for open spaces that can be recognized as best practices for social distancing and adaptation in post-pandemic design, and by presenting design proposals for the post-pandemic adaptation of green open spaces belonging to university buildings, this paper will try to envision possible design strategies to transform green areas into resilient spaces adaptable to different needs and future scenarios.