How do we break down barriers in physical spaces?

What does local mean when the shop window of an eBay trader is closer to you on your laptop than the independent clothes store down your high street?

Who’s got more foreign workers in their town, the village with a high influx of immigrants or the suburb whose leading employer has off-shored its factory to India? Who has a more multicultural experience, the kid going to school in Brick Lane or the gamer from Shropshire learning Minecraft with children from across the world?

Even at a very local level, something as benign as an administrative boundary can have deadly consequences. Type ‘gang map’ into Google and see if a gang controls the area where you live. Mine is at the intersection of the ‘territories’ of three different gangs! For them, geography symbolises power and threat — many young people are scared of crossing into other postcodes.

We can learn to see the invisible and physical borders that people experience in our neighbourhoods. In that case, we can design and open up public spaces to be more accessible and inclusive for everyone to feel the area is theirs.

How could we repurpose this for Covid 19, where we rethink the use of public spaces when we move out of lockdown?

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