Common areas, common causes: Public space in high-rise buildings during COVID-19

Keywords: public space, high-rise, verticality, COVID-19
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 71

Abstract

This paper explores new meanings of public space in high-rise buildings that have taken shape in the COVID-19 pandemic. While scholars have highlighted its multitude of meanings and the wide range of physical locations the term might apply to, suggesting a kind of spectrum of publicness, public space continues to be commonly understood in binary opposition to private property, and associated primarily with particular physical forms such as ‘green’ spaces, streets, or squares. This paper explores forms of public space that have been rendered palpable during the COVID-19 pandemic: public spaces in high rise buildings. We consider both physical and social public space in this context, thinking about the safety of both common areas and amenities in buildings, and the emergence of new publics around the conditions of tower living during the pandemic (particularly focusing on tenant struggles). We determine that the planning, use, and social production of public space in high-rise buildings are topics of increasing concern and urgency, and that the presence of public space in the vertical built forms and lifestyles proliferating in urban regions complicates common understandings of public space. We argue that the questions raised by the pandemic call upon us to reconsider the meanings of public space.