Jongwan Kwan
Curbside signs found in 2020 during Covid-19 pandemic
If the curb is a line with exactitude, the curbside materialises as a smudge – an imprecise edge space that provides leeway for improvisation. Soon after city officials in New York City and other North American cities announced new curbside occupation in order to de-densify streets, a network of chairs and tables oozed into the streets for offsite activities such as outdoor dining and open-air pickup, liberating curbsides from the curbs and fusing seemingly incompatible surfaces. New ‘Curbside Pickup’ and ‘Curbside Only’ signs not only cast away curbsides’ ambiguities and configure destination points that people can navigate and inhabit throughout, but they also effect the anomalous conversion of the banal and residual corridor into a programmable platform. These ad hoc signs present a new form of urbanism in which the storefront is conceived as a wall rather than a threshold, and the curbside in front becomes a flexible room tethered to the inaccessible architecture. Perhaps the public arteries in our cities’ new Nolli maps would have been shown thicker than before because of the extensive use of curbsides.
Often, the crisis of contagious diseases provokes a force of permanent transformation in both modern and contemporary streets. As much as the urban streets have a long history of dealing with public sanitation and health, the relationship with the epidemic is not new. Before current curbs, New York City had deep gutters in streets to combat a cholera pandemic outbreak in the late 19th century. They separated horse manure and impure water from the ground above. Similar to how the gutter’s apparent divide evolved into a shallow stepped curb in modern streets with conduits and machines etched, the curb line is functionally diminished during the Covid-19 pandemic. We now experience how city-owned property downplays itself as a separator and becomes the mediator between private and public spheres partly operated and managed by various private entities. Is this possibly a glimpse into the forthcoming chapter of the urban streetscape? What would the great modernists like Corbusier and Hilberseimer say about the furnished streets? Would the urban theorist Jane Jacobs have enjoyed more eyes- on-the-street and the smallness that the city is offering? Should planners and officials revisit the design tool kits from various architects and designers in the 1990s and 2000s who took the prevailing urban condition as a subject to tinker? Nonetheless, the pandemic crisis demonstrates to cities that fixity is not guaranteed and maintenance is not the answer. In fact, most of the new curbside usages are self-emerged and self-organised without high- level design or physical transformation, powered instead by the reorienting of our perspective toward adaptation and the paying of more attention to contemporary cultural values of sharing and mutual interest to support local businesses and the neighbourhood.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 46
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