Community-Responsive Public Spaces Were More Resilient During COVID, Report Finds

A new report by the Knight Foundation has shown through data what many of us have experienced for ourselves this past year: Outdoor public spaces are even more important now than they were when there wasn’t a pandemic raging around the world.

“Adaptive Public Spaces: Places for People in the Pandemic and Beyond” looked at seven different public spaces across the U.S. (each of which received partial funding from Knight) to assess their impact in four different areas—design and programming; community/resident focus; its impact on the broader community, town, or city; and its long-term financial and operational sustainability.