The simplest tool for improving cities is free

As cities across the world open up, urban planners and architects – and the rest of us — are looking around, asking whether our streets and buildings will be, or should be, the same again.

A pair of writers in Cambridge, Mass., Sara Hendren and Son Eunkyoung, have some suggestions on improvements that can be made in existing cities for free, that will help inhabitants visit the municipalities as they once were before the pandemic.

Their thoughts were published the New York Times. They refer

their hometown where, for decades, a stretch of Memorial Drive that runs along the Charles River has been closed to automobiles on Sundays, for the warmer half of the year.

In the absence of cars on a four-lane thoroughfare beside the water, all kinds of other street users blossom: Skateboards, bicycles, hoverboards, strollers, wheelchairs and walkers, people on feet and on wheels now moving slowly enough to witness the late spring gosling, the ever-present seagulls or the rarer magic and grace of heron feeding along the water’s edge. A towering line of stately, centenarian sycamores forms an unbroken canopy over several blocks.

This section of Memorial Drive is formerly called “Riverbend Park” during weekend closures, but it’s not a park in any physical sense.

It’s an open public space transformed into a park without any construction.

It happens in cities everywhere:

Design, or redesign, created by time.

In Mexico City, time structures were developed to recover play space for children. The city was home to more than two million children in 2015.

In a way, a city might change its shape to adjust to its citizens changing needs.

A weekend clock turns an open street into something else entirely — a time structure organized outside commuter efficiency or traffic flows, urban planners sometimes call it “temporal zoning.”

There is one transformational tool for building cities that’s right in front of us, calling for more sustained attention: The design of time.

Time can also be a transformative tool for providing spaces with more ambitious goals, making the built world more accessible and equitable.

A found park, a welcoming museum, streets that shift their shapes for children: These are designs built with time as a sculpting tool.

Hendren is an artist and design researcher and a professor at Olin College of Engineering. She is the author of “What can a body do? How we meet the built world.”