5th Studio worked with Westminster City Council to develop plans to transform the city in order to help bars, clubs and restaurants to reopen safely as lockdown rules relaxed.
Westminster is the social heart of London, and businesses in the borough produce 3% of Britain’s GDP. These temporary measures were aimed at allowing businesses to reopen in the summer of 2020.
5th Studio’s work on public realm improvements focused initially on Soho, but also covered Covent Garden, Marylebone and Mayfair. The work developed options for al fresco dining, extending pavement space and in some cases allowed timed closure of roads to allow dining in the space of the street.
More generally, cities around the world are beginning to transform to address the challenges of the climate emergency, and this process of change has been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing urgent realisation to urban initiatives from the Parisian proximate “ville du quart d’heure”, to Amsterdam’s adoption of Kate Raworth’s balanced economic model to guide how cities and business can become more resilient and adaptable as spatial and urban requirements shift.
In London, the Mayor Sadiq Kahn has been developed an integrated set of policies called Good Growth by Design. As a Design Advocate for the Mayor, 5th Studio Director Tom Holbrook has been helping develop policy on a number of these strands, including the Public London Charter, and Designing for a Circular Economy. The Good Growth programme was the foundation of the city’s response to the pandemic.
