While planners, thinkers and policymakers are talking a lot these days about how the COVID-19 pandemic will change the way we design and build our communities in the future, some of those changes are already taking place, say experts, who spoke at the opening session today of the Center for Planning Excellence’s 2020 Virtual Smart Growth Summit.

The session, the first of six to be held virtually over the next several weeks, focused on how pandemics have historically changed communities and looked at how some of those changes are already reshaping urban centers around the globe.

Land use planner Mike Lydon of New York-based Street Plans discussed how his firm has created an open-source platform that is collecting data on how cities are repurposing their streets to enable people to spend more time outdoors doing things like walking, cycling, dining al fresco and socializing, among other things.

Over the past six months, the firm has compiled data from more than 400 communities in more than 40 countries and has identified six distinct typologies of new streetscapes: open streets, “streateries,” open curbs, shared streets, temporary bike lanes and pedestrian thoroughfares.

“Streets make up one-third of all the land in cities so they play a critical role in how we design our public spaces,” Lydon says. “There has been an adaptation of our streets since the pandemic … and the speed has been remarkable on a global scale. It’s all within the past six or seven months.”

Lydon noted that some of the experiments have met with resistance, as in the city of Oakland, California, where some raised concerns about a program implemented earlier this year to close 74 miles of streets to vehicular traffic.

Still, he said, cities like New York have not only saved more than 100,000 service-industry jobs by allowing restaurants to open in new spaces on the city sidewalks and streets, but have also increased local government revenue by nearly 500%.

“Dining yields more money than parking,” he says.

The Virtual Smart Growth Summit continues Oct. 6. For more information or to register, click here. https://virtual-smart-growth-summit-2020.heysummit.com/tickets/