photo by Gary He
Curbside dining during Covid-19 pandemic. Brooklyn, New York, 2020
Curbsides are the hotspots amid lockdown. The mundane peripheries in each city block have grown busier during the Covid-19 pandemic because of the unprecedented demands for takeout, outdoor dining, drive-through and online delivery services, while other parts of the city are mostly deserted and silent. This development has brought solace in the times of indefinite quarantine as curbsides lend themselves to the public and to local businesses. Almost no shops and restaurants would have survived otherwise, and more people would have left the cities for cheaper and safer places. The extensive use of curbsides, crossing between borderlines, is one of the side effects, so to speak, of the new habit of social distancing. In light of the impact, we see the possibility of curbside recast as a flexible infrastructure that responds to new civic demands. Though the curbside inherently derives from a curb, it identifies differently from its stem. A curb is an immobile artefact that demarcates a closed line that explicitly splits the ground into two surfaces to control various types of flows, including cars, bicycles, pedestrians, fresh water, and sewage. A curbside, on the contrary, is closer to an atmosphere set by parallel offsets from a line marked on a single master plan. Despite its existence everywhere, the curbside is treated as a non-site with indifference — it presents puddles, leaves, and garbage. Because of their ambiguity, curbsides primarily foster extra distancing, in perception, between the binaries divided by the centre line: safe and dangerous; slow and fast; clean and dirty; dry and wet. curbside effect jongwan kwon
US Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institute
The curbside snorkel chute mailbox in New York, 1953, was an attempt to overcome the separation from the curb by allowing motorists to drop off their mail without getting out of their vehicle.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 44
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