COVID-19 - A New Strategy for Parklets
The Product Lab team is working across Oakland to create and support innovative uses of outdoor space by small businesses during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We’re supporting Oakland Indie Alliance, Arcsine Architecture, Shelterwerk, Turner Construction, and architecture students from UC Berkeley, as they develop low-cost designs using open-source engineering, donated materials and labor, and coordinated advocacy to enable more businesses to construct fixtures outside their storefronts.
Flex Streets is a City of Oakland initiative which is intended to reduce transmission risk by enabling businesses to serve their customers in safer outdoor space. We all recognize that when people congregate indoors, transmission risk increases. But this is also an opportunity for Oakland to change the nature of its outdoor spaces. The City’s parklet program was designed primarily to insulate the City and its departments from responsibility; because parks need public resources to exist, ‘parklets’ shifted that burden to the businesses who sponsor and maintain them.
Unfortunately, this means that only certain businesses can afford to take on this burden, limiting the deployment of parklets to the wealthiest commercial districts and its busiest restaurants. This confines the public health benefit of these installations to a very narrow area, and a certain class of customers.
By intentionally reaching out to sites outside downtown, and finding partners who can help to build, manage, and hold liability for these structures, we’re creating a new model. In East Oakland, for instance, certain grassroots nonprofits, churches, or business associations are better equipped to deal with these challenges, and when the parklet model can be adapted to include them, we all benefit.
On the design and engineering side of this problem, by taking the approach of scale, we can create designs that are suitable, durable, easy to build from a range of available materials. We’re exploring the creation of certain features (planters, benches, etc.) in local factories to reduce the cost of building them onsite. Like our Low Cost Sneeze Guard, this approach creates products that are relevant now, and can serve as the basis for ongoing production, job creation, and economic activity later.
We’re excited to be working on this project with lots of other smart, creative and resourceful people across Oakland. Stay tuned for updates!