Reflecting on City Governmental Responses to COVID-19: Focus on Design Justice

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant stay-at-home mandates, local governments in some cities in the United States implemented programs in response to the pandemic. This article focuses on Slow Streets, which were several programs implemented in eleven cities (Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston, and New York) in the United States. The programs were intended to keep people healthy by providing temporary public spaces on residential roads where residents were allowed to exercise and socialize. Some practitioners characterized the programs as tactical urbanism or tactical placemaking and as agile responses to the public health crisis. The programs deserve a critical reflection, considering their potential impact on community health and the limited amount of the literature on the program in terms of design justice, which is an approach to design that prioritizes marginalized communities and challenges their structural inequality. This reflective study attempts to fill that gap in the literature of architecture and urban design. This article aims to examine whether the Slow Streets programs promoted design justice. To address that aim, we propose a social justice framework to evaluate the program, because social justice is essential to design justice. Data from publicly available information online about the eleven cities’ Slow Streets programs, interviews, surveys, focus groups, and the interdisciplinary literature support the qualitative research. The study outcomes suggest that the Slow Streets program had limited success because their attention to the priorities of underserved populations was ineffective. We argue that while the programs provided a timely response to the pandemic, the programs did not adequately address the vulnerability of low-income communities of color due to the limited consideration of design justice. Building on the lessons from social justice and human geography, the article concludes with recommendations for future practices including place-cultivating and human geography-informed design to better serve vulnerable communities of color.