Join us on a Global Ideas Tour mini-series where we take a deep dive on key elements of cities, places and spaces with our global WSP colleagues as they share learnings, experiences and thoughts on the future as we start to look past the COVID 19 pandemic.
We are all social creatures, but how can we support a stronger focus on social outcomes?
Join Mo Saraf, Lucy Grieg and Michael Hromek, dialling in from Sweden and Sydney, as they discuss the importance of social connections post-pandemic with host, Sara Stace.
They will also touch on the social aspects of our environment and the ways in which we have adapted our interactions to fit with social distancing, how important public space is for diversity and integration and the importance of greening our cities and neighbourhoods.
Show Notes
The "Shifting Streets" Covid-19 mobility dataset, Combs, T., Pardo, C.F., Streetplans, Epiandes, MobilityWorks, & Datasketch (2020), http://pedbikeinfo.org/resources/resources_details.cfm?id=5235.
Join us on a Global Ideas Tour mini-series where we take a deep dive on key elements of cities, places and spaces with our global WSP colleagues as they share learnings, experiences and thoughts on the future as we start to look past the COVID 19 pandemic.
We are all social creatures, but how can we support a stronger focus on social outcomes?
Join Mo Saraf, Lucy Grieg and Michael Hromek, dialling in from Sweden and Sydney, as they discuss the importance of social connections post-pandemic with host, Sara Stace.
They will also touch on the social aspects of our environment and the ways in which we have adapted our interactions to fit with social distancing, how important public space is for diversity and integration and the importance of greening our cities and neighbourhoods.
Show Notes
The "Shifting Streets" Covid-19 mobility dataset, Combs, T., Pardo, C.F., Streetplans, Epiandes, MobilityWorks, & Datasketch (2020), http://pedbikeinfo.org/resources/resources_details.cfm?id=5235.
Hello, and welcome to the People and Place podcast Here's your host Sara Stace Director of Cities for WSP Australia.
Sara:Hello everyone. I'm Sara Stace and you're listening to our Global Tour miniseries as part of the People and Place podcast. In this Global Tour, we're taking a deep dive on three key elements of our daily lives, cities, spaces, and social life. I'm joined by WSP colleagues from around the world as they share their learnings, experiences, and thoughts on the future as we start to look past the pandemic and its impact on urban life. Today we'll be discussing the social aspects of our environment. The ways we have adapted to our interactions to fit with social distancing. How important public space is to enable diverse and equitable access for the whole community and how interacting with our local neighborhoods can lead to great discoveries and new ways of connecting. I'm hosting today's session from the land of the Gadigal and the Bidjigal people of the Eora nation in Sydney in Australia. I pay my respects to elders past, dating back more than 40,000 years, as well as elders present and emerging. I welcome our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners and participants, including Michael Hromek, who is joining us today.
Michael:Yaama, everyone.
Sara:And also as part of our panel today is Lucy Greig, who is based in Sydney. Welcome Lucy.
Lucy:Hi, everyone really glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sara:And Mo Sarraf, who's our colleague in Sweden.
Mo:Hi, Sara. Happy to be here.
Sara:So today we'll be covering the topic of social spaces and connections in our cities and urban areas. Humans are innately social creatures. We love being in the company of others, connecting and finding joy and meaning in our interactions with others. So we're going to start with a introduction from each of our panelists today. We'll start with Michael Hromek. Michael, I was listening to a fascinating yarn that you recorded on our People and Place podcast with your sisters, Danile and Sian. Can you introduce us to who you are, your role and which country you're joining us from?
Michael:Yeah, thank you. I'm coming from Gadigal lands in Sydney. My family is Budawang and I'm an architect with WSP. So family is connected to the Butlers and the Browns down south and Hromek is Czechoslovakian. That's my father's side. I'm involved with helping with Aboriginal design in our projects and helping engage communities with co-design ideas and everything Aboriginal in relation to projects.
Sara:Thanks Michael and Lucy you're also in Australia. Could you tell us where you are and which country you're joining us from?
Lucy:Thanks Sara. I'm joining you from Sydney this evening and I'm part of the Strategy, Community and Place team, which is part of WSP's advisory business. It's great to be here with you all and to be with familiar colleagues and to be meeting Mo from Sweden. So really happy to be part of this conversation. I've been at WSP for close to two years now and finding it a really dynamic environment to work in. Michael's mentioned that you're involved in all things Aboriginal and I feel that there are so many opportunities to work across the social space. My background was starting out life as a designer similarly, not an architect, actually a fashion designer. And then moving into study social science and working for the last couple of decades in social research and social sustainability.
Sara:Thank you Lucy and Mo can you tell us about yourself?
Mo:Thanks, Sara. I'm an urban planner with a background in architecture and I'm a part of the team, Social Sustainability and Processes at WSP Advisory in Stockholm in Sweden. It's just for a few months that I've joined WSP. I was a researcher before joining WSP and the last research project I was doing, it was an international post-doc called multiculturalism in urban planning, which was pursued in a number of universities in Sweden and abroad, including Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I work mainly on the relationship between urban form and different types of social processes and social relations, mainly focusing on ideas like cultural diversity integration, segregation, community building. But more or less always have glasses of urban form on processing social relations.
Sara:Great, thank you Mo. So we are now in the middle of another major lockdown in which more than half of Australia's population is currently having to isolate or keep socially distant. Whilst the situation is dire and there's been an incredible sadness around what the consequences have been from both the social and mental health outcomes, an incredibly positive and unexpected response has been the extent to which cities around the world have responded by providing more space for people. Tabitha Combs and Carlos Pardo prepared a massive global database of over a thousand examples ranging from streets that were open to people to walk or cycle to outdoor open parklets for dining and pop-up cycleways. There's also an Instagram and Twitter account called Space for Health, which has images of many of these projects. And it's really wonderful just to see how creative the responses have been around tactical urbanism and then really providing that space for people to exercise and socialize in a different circumstance. So the pandemic has truly highlighted how important publicly accessible spaces for people to interact with one another. I'm going to throw to our panelists, first to Lucy, what are the social spaces that you've missed most during the pandemic?
Lucy:Thanks, Sara. Without doubt it's been Sydney's galleries. I'm a bit of a gallery-aholic and I would consider the Art Gallery of New South Wales, my spiritual home. But also places like the Museum of Contemporary Art and some of the Sydney Living Museums buildings. They're an absolute favorite of mine for getting inspiration and connecting with friends and with the incredible world of art. But what I've appreciated immensely is the effort that some people have put in to their retail spaces. So while I can't visit a gallery, being able to walk down the local high street and see the kinds of things that people are doing. And Sara you've mentioned the spaces for people in some of those parklets and pop-ups and things. I think people have been incredibly creative at that retail and cafe level about how they reinvent those spaces and make them appealing and keep all our spirits up.
Mo:Yes, I think that, I missed that social life more than social places actually and I think what a pandemic brought about was new definitions or dimensions to social life, per se. What I could say, for instance, we, as urban planners, we often talk about third places as apart from first place we consider home and second place is the workplace, and we talked about how important third places like cafe, library, and the social life places are important for community and development and for social life in general. What happened was that actually some overlapping dimensions suddenly emerged. Suddenly people were sitting in their home, in their bedroom, on their sofa and talking to their clients, bringing workplace into their private home. And the other way also you were, for instance, in public somewhere always well-defined as being public and accessible to everyone, but people were expecting more of privacy and keeping distance in public places. So what I see is more blurry boundaries between private and public, semi-private, semi- public places that emerge and grow to both new dimensions and to social life. So what I missed most was again, back to your question, was social life that could happen in different places and how this new pandemic made new changes in our understanding of social life.
Sara:What about you, Michael?
Michael:Mo, I love your idea of the third places, first, second, third place. That's very interesting. And I'm also interested in that third place in terms of near to nature space. Very much a connection to country, Aboriginal space. And I think that's what connection to country is in many ways for Aboriginal people. It's a very loaded term and very complex term, but part of it is having another space that you care for, that you visit quite often. So that's one thing that I've really lamented in all of this. I was just going through my journey of cultural expanding and competency and the lockdown hit and I was joining a men's group, an Aboriginal men's group. And we're going out into the mountains in Sydney and learning about law and Dharug ideas. So that's completely stopped, which is quite sad. But not to say we don't start again, but I think that's one sort of space I have missed. Because in many ways I live in an area that I feel lucky that all the little parks and the dog parks and but it's those near to nature, the beach, the bush, the mountains. That's what I'm missing the most.
Lucy:And Michael, just when we kicked off, you were talking about some new discoveries that you've made in your local neighborhood. And I feel your discoveries may be more significant than mine, but it has been a time for really doing that and getting to know the things around you, perhaps that you've never really stopped to think too hard about before.
Michael:Yeah, I live in Rozelle where there's a lot of sandstone and just behind my house, through thorough inspection being bored around the house, I found a whole bunch of old Aboriginal rock carvings. And one looks like a few water birds and a shield. Amazing stuff and I found it and I was like, oh, I need to tell someone, who can I tell? I think I'm going to share it on, there's a Facebook group for this stuff. But yeah, I think the idea being I'm suddenly much more aware of my local area and looking at it in a different way.
Lucy:I feel exactly the same way.
Sara:I guess for me, what I've noticed as well is how much our social spaces have changed for children. So I have two young children at home and their ability to be able to connect socially has been very limited. In part because they're not able to go to school and in part because they can no longer have more than one friend together at a time and they need to be outdoors. It's just created a very unusual situation for them. And now, their social spaces actually virtual more often than not. So they're joining each other on Skype and they're playing Roblox or Minecraft together, or they're talking to their family overseas by phone. And I think that it'll be interesting to see what those consequences are in the longterm around that social space that's not necessarily physical space.
Lucy:I agree. I think it's been a real game changer for the way that people interact with one another. And I feel that people with kids at home have really done an incredible job throughout this period with homeschooling and just the changing dynamics of households and how you manage that day to day. But I think you're right, Sara, I think there could be some long-term changes to the way that we relate to one another. And perhaps even to the way that people think about formal education into the future.
Michael:Makes me think what do we gain and what do we lose from this? So when we meet physically, we see each other, we understand each other in a body sense, but in the digital sense we kind of get that in a similar way. We've got our cameras on or our cameras off and we can see each other talking but what's the consequence here.
Sara:That's right. Actually that's a bit of a lead for me to jump into our next question, which I'm going to start with Mo. What are the social connections you've seen form or social trends that you're seeing emerging?
Mo:When I look back, actually, what I could spot as if we could say they're trends. But I would say they somehow left me confused was that, for instance, I give you an example that me as an urban planner working with like integration programs always advocating the ideas, like bringing people together, bringing people closer in public space and establish connections, different sort of ties between people in public spaces. And bringing people in place together and create social life. And then suddenly in a very short span of time, it's changed to keeping distance, do not come to the public space. If you respect others, keep distance. So suddenly it was a bit confusing for me that how, for years, we'd been advocating something and suddenly we never thought about those dramatic changes that could challenge our understanding or taken for granted ideas that how it could be really shaped in a very short span of time. Another example was like always favoring public transport to private cars and trying to make cities more accessible by public transport, walkability, bikeability, but suddenly private car has become socially acceptable that people would use private car as a way to show respect to others in a way to give distance. So these conflicting definitions were, I would say, not trends but the things that emerged and at least left me a bit confused and I've not found very good answers to some of them yet.
Michael:It's interesting, Mo. The idea of someone being a little bit too close to you in a park. Suddenly everyone's in the parks and it's almost like the parks, at least where I'm around, they're a little bit full or you'll go to a spot and you want to hang out for a bit. Oh, someone's there. So the distance and the size of the park is suddenly important.
Sara:Yeah, I've certainly found my children and particularly my younger one is quite anxious about going to the park and he doesn't want to. So he's picked up this very strong messaging to keep a distance from others. And so he's actually quite willing to do lots of long walks, but he doesn't want to go to the park because he's worried about how many people are there. So it'll be, again, this sort of, what is the impact mean on our psyches in that longer term?
Lucy:Yeah, I think they're really interesting points that you've raised. And we've certainly seen some of those issues come out of research that we've been doing where people's perceptions of safety have changed from feeling safe in places with lots of other people to feeling unsafe and visiting places perhaps after dark when they think they're going to be less people around. Whereas previously they might've avoided those places after dark for fear of being unsafe. So a really interesting change in the way people think about spaces that you've all talked about. And I think, recent experiences of Sydney and lockdown, we have seen people being quite conscious of looking out for one another. People reaching out to people and perhaps in ways that are appropriate and maintaining distance. But it has meant you value those relationships that you have with people around you when you can't be going in and out of the city and further field to make those social connections. I think coming back to your earlier point, Mo, we are all social beings and it does lift you when you're able to have those interactions. And you also talked about commuting. And I think we've really seen that in Sydney, there was a really sharp drop off in people not taking public transport for health reasons and going back to using cars. And I'm hoping that doesn't continue on. I hope that as things get under control here we do, or we'll start to go back to public transport, but definitely we've seen a huge number of people riding bikes.
Sara:Yeah, I've also noticed a few other emerging trends as well has been around a much greater emphasis from workplaces around mental health and a much greater acknowledgement that mental health is incredibly important. The other aspect I think has been, as you mentioned Lucy, more people just getting out and walking and cycling in their area. I've certainly started connecting with some of my work colleagues because I haven't been able to go in and meet them in the office. If they live locally is to go for a walking meeting together and let's begin, again, a very unexpected result. But it's also been a really great way to connect with people and also feel like I'm connecting with my local area.
Lucy:I hope to do one of those walking meetings with you someday, Sara. I think also there's understandably that renewed focus on the home. Lots of people can't walk down the street without seeing people are renovating. People are thinking about their homes in new ways and perhaps working from home, how those different spaces within the home function for work and for family life. As well as a lot of people interacting, like you were saying earlier Michael, online and perhaps thinking about new ways of having relationships, not just with work colleagues, but with friendship circles. And then we've also seen the importance of some very fundamental services like hairdressers. And I think, it might seem frivolous I can certainly show you all, not the listeners but the people online, my bad hair which is seriously suffering from not having been to a hairdresser for quite some weeks now. But hairdressers are so much more than hairdressers. It's all about the connection, having those important conversations and being able to just share how you feel and have those moments of connection. Also, I think you've all talked about the importance of public space. And I think that is certainly a trend I don't expect to go anywhere. Even though all our parks are getting full, I think we're just going to continue seeing people valuing those spaces more and more.
Sara:And that I guess comes back to the question that Mo raised earlier about how do we allow people to integrate or share and learn from other cultures when we can't interact. So how do we progress some of those social needs.
Mo:That's a very big question and I don't think neither me nor anyone has a very clear answer to that at the moment. But what could come as really important to notice is that actually this situation has brought different influences, or maybe I could say has different impacts on different social groups. And that's something that we need to take into account that, for instance, which groups were the most vulnerable groups in this situation. Which ones needed more help to be able to continue their life and to be a part of the society. This is something that they was some research and some projects been done in Sweden to show that how different neighborhoods with different socioeconomic levels and characters were affected by pandemic in different ways. And how we could make sure that the situation does not affect the most vulnerable group of society who have been already disadvantaged due to so many other reasons then comes this pandemic and again another. So these are the issues that I think we need to take into account that the situation is not completely equal to everyone or every social group. And we need to take that into account very seriously.
Sara:Yeah, we certainly saw that emerging during mid 2020 with the Black Lives Matter groups, so a lot of them took to the streets to do even things like tactical urbanism, like painting streets with big signage saying Black Lives Matter and so on. But I do wonder whether that's continued to have an effect or are continuing to think about that social equity and social justice more broadly. What do you think about that, Michael? Are we seeing meaningful social outcomes being achieved?
Michael:In certain areas I think so. In regards to the work I'm doing, there's been a lot of focus recently on Aboriginal input into changes to country. So any project over a million dollars has to have an Aboriginal plan or how are you going to deal with it? And then upwards there's employment targets and a whole range of incentives to get people involved in being mindful of this input. So I think in that sense that is a good outcome. Because I am seeing elders be given that respect that they probably didn't have. I hear it a lot. I hear it in my own family. My sisters and I are the first to celebrate our Aboriginality, whereas it was a thing you used to hide. But, and same thing for some of these elders we're dealing with. And in this environment it's been tricky because normally we want to meet on country. We want to go to the site, we want to go and figure out the best way to approach it. However we can't. And we haven't been able to do that for a while now. However, there has been some good outcomes in terms of elders getting online and that being a potentially beneficial thing for a variety of reasons. It's negative because we'd prefer to meet physically and get around the table with the plans and draw up solutions for country. But there's also advantages for being online. So some of the elders we've been working with on the Level Crossing Removal projects, Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung/Bunurong elders down there, they've been involved in quite a lot of input into some of the new railway stations there, some of the public parks. And working with them we've managed to thread a story and a narrative that's important for them into the country. And the digital environment's given a bit of comfort to that. They don't have to come into a stuffy office in the city that takes them all day to get there. They can just turn on the computer, log into Teams or Zoom, and then they've got a 30 plus team presenting to them. And I've found that to be potentially beneficial for them to share stories. It's a nice safe space for them to be more sharing versus the boardroom, which is a very different space.
Lucy:We've been spending a bit of time thinking about social outcomes too. Including realizing opportunities for social value and benefit within the workforce at WSP. So really thinking about gender diversity and parity and Aboriginal participation. But also in terms of realizing social value as some of the projects that we work on like the ones that Michael's involved in. And I guess while we might be conducting social research or doing community engagement with a view to achieving social license or undertaking a social impact assessment or infrastructure study. We're also starting to work with clients to help them think about designing in those social procurement outcomes from the start. So I think that's a really positive area that is gaining traction. But to go back to your points earlier, Mo, about the ways that different members of the community and parts of society have been impacted by COVID has been very uneven. We did some work recently with Randwick City Council on a social study, which sought to understand opportunities to build in social value and benefit for councils, social inclusion and access plan and all other social studies. And we're able to integrate a series of questions from the personal wellbeing index and build on that with some other measures of health and wellbeing, to give us a really good understanding of how people are feeling about their physical and mental health at the moment. But also how they feel about those opportunities looking ahead. And we did see that particular community, which is if you look at it on the whole quite an affluent community in inner Sydney, there is quite a large split between people who are doing well and feel they're doing well and then people who are really experiencing some significant impacts of this most recent COVID experience. And I think thinking about what that means for those say 20% of people who maybe didn't have great mental health outcomes to start with is going to be really important looking ahead. I think particularly young people as well, and Sara you've touched on the very different experience for kids through COVID and perhaps some of the loss of their social networks, but the experience of young people and people who are leaving uni and not doing the traditional travel overseas or not being able to start a job where you can actually meet people. But yeah, I think there's a whole lot of things that we could be doing to look into the experiences of those kinds of groups.
Mo:Another thing, that if I may have time to add here, is that also in line with what we've been talking especially in regards to previous question, is that I see a potential outcome or potential influence on density of cities, especially larger cities, and downtowns and city centers. What you see is that, for instance in urban planning, we've been always talking about compact cities as one of the most sustainable ways of development and having social interaction and short commute as inherent parts of the concept of the city as the place people get together to have a common goal or to continue or progress their businesses or work. I mean all the definition of the city, but what you are seeing now is happening is that people maybe do not need to commute anymore. That means they can sit at their homes and work from there. So the question of social interaction in real physical space is becoming a challengable. And if we say that, okay, maybe this won't be important anymore, then comes the question do we need to continue advocating compact cities as the way to go forward? How can we convince people not to live further away? In order to be able to afford, for instance, larger housing. So they would have it more comfortable at home and their home would be also the workplace. And all these, I could also add another dimension. So, okay, the auto-drive cars are coming, which might put really new standards and the distance that we could travel in one hour then maybe in the future will be like 10 minutes. So all of these together comes back to the question that are we going to have a density of the cities, especially larger cities, as we have now or maybe we see other trends coming out of this pandemic.
Lucy:Really interesting, Mo. And I think that idea of, if cities centers aren't what they are now, but we want to keep attracting people to those places, what do they become? Are they places where we see co-living more affordable options for young people to live? Are they places that have social housing, seniors housing. They're all ideas that have been floating around. And I do think they're important things to think about. As you say if we don't all have to commute, if we don't all continue to work in these large centers.
Michael:That's a good point. It reminds me of Byron Bay as a local example. It's been completely influxed with people wanting to move there during this pandemic. I've got family there and you can't rent a place there anymore. And if you do, you've got to pay a lot. Whereas in Sydney you can actually find quite a few bargains. Rents are dropping in that sense. I think you're right, Mo and Lucy, the density needs of cities may not be what we think they are. At least in the current perspective of where we're sitting.
Sara:So we're going to go to our last question for the panel today. And this one is really asking about hope for the future. Where do we go from here? What are you most excited about when you look at the future of social spaces? So we might kick off with Mo.
Mo:What I'm most excited to see that would happen in the future is that the peripheries of the cities, especially main cities, show their potentials as places for social life. That means it's not only the city centers and downtowns that are the main place for social life. But also we see that, exactly what Sara you mentioned in one of the questions, that you could adventure your local areas more by walking or running. And so people see the potentials in their local neighborhood and bring the social life from the main downtowns to suburbs and to peripheries of the city. So I'm very much looking forward to see that, okay, we have not only downtown, but also all other parts and suburbs have really meaningful social life. And people do not necessarily need to go to the city center to have their social life, but also in their local neighborhoods and other areas it could happen.
Lucy:I share your thoughts, Mo. I would love to think that we had more, more diversity in the kinds of places that were attractive and appealing to people. And that idea of not having to commute is also one that I find very appealing because it gives you some of your time back. I think in terms of what excites me, I think there are really good examples of clients, organizations doing things that are leading us in the right direction. And I think in Sydney the 50 year vision for Greater Sydney's open space and parklands is a case in point. And several of us have talked about parks being people places and that is one of their fundamental elements of the vision is Parklands for People. So I think striving to not just enhance the spaces that we have and to make sure that they're future ready, but also enlarging spaces that we were able to use. And that's one of the things that Greater Sydney Parklands is looking to do is to make those connections across the Sydney green grid. I also think the Design and Place SEPP that has been introduced by government recently is a really great step in the right direction. And gives value to the way people feel about different types of public spaces. To look at the quality of those spaces and the design of those spaces to meet the needs of our communities. So yeah, they're things that are really exciting me, one of the fundamental underpinnings of the Design and Place SEPP is starting with country. Michael has spoken about how important that is.
Sara:And Michael.
Michael:I think I'd probably be most excited about a few things, but first of all, a general intense and appreciative focus on an Aboriginal vernacular or an Aboriginal history or respect towards that as being a important thing for the construction industry and for placemaking. So that's quite exciting for me because we talk about diversity of spaces and different cultures, different inputs being comfortable in public and private space. I think that's the key of what we do as engineers and designers and problem solvers. But for Australia to have this focus at the moment is quite encouraging. Of course, cause I'm in the industry, so why not? But I'm also seeing elders and people who weren't necessarily engaged in a space like this be very excited and completely open to being involved in these placemaking spaces. And so a place that excites me in particular is Sydney in itself. I'm seeing so many big projects that are coming up or small projects and all of them are considering that country first or connection to country designing with country approach. And I'm excited to see what they look like in five, ten years time.
Sara:Absolutely. And I think that's a really great point, Michael, that's something I'm certainly noticing as a huge change to our approach in Australia is around a much greater appreciation of designing with country. I think we still have a long way to go on that journey and hopefully we're all on that journey together and led by the likes of yourself and our Indigenous Design Services team in WSP. I think another opportunity that I see as well, and I have a lot of hope for the future, is that we do a lot of work around movement and place with various state governments and local governments in Australia and New Zealand. And there's a much greater appreciation I think amongst those transport agencies that are streetscape doesn't just have a movement function for all those motor vehicles that it also has a place function. And that is really important to the community around that, to regional attraction, the fact that places have a value. And I think that's a really exciting trend that I'm seeing emerging and hope that we continue to be able to do that sort of work in future. I really appreciate the fact that everyone's joined in today. A particular thanks to our guest from Sweden, Mo Sarraf, to Lucy Greig, and to Michael Hromek. My name is Sara Stace and I'm very pleased that you've been able to join us on the podcast today. Thank you.
Mo:Thank you.
Lucy:Thank you.