This City Crowdsourced Its Social Distancing Redesign for Summer
07/20/2020
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A panel of city officials, business leaders and public health experts has selected its winners in Baltimore’s “Design for Distancing” competition.
Tasked with reimagining the Maryland city for safe commerce and tourism, designers from across the country submitted their ideas visually. With 162 entries, it’s safe to say the review committee—which included representatives from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health—had a lot to look over. The Baltimore Business Journal reported that the winning concepts came from Baltimore, Ohio, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania.
The designs will now move into the build phase, bringing pop-up experiences to 17 business districts across Baltimore this summer and helping to support the city’s small businesses. The designs are also featured in a PDF guide to help communities recover from the pandemic lockdowns and resulting business losses. The winners each received a $5,000 stipend to finalize their designs.
“This guidebook is Baltimore’s gift to the global community, and we hope it will be a valuable resource to areas far beyond our city for the recovery of our economy and population,” said Bernard C. Young, Baltimore City Mayor.
The Baltimore Development Corp. launched the Design for Distancing program in partnership with the nonprofit Neighborhood Design Center (NDC) and a $1.5 million investment from Baltimore's COVID-19 Small Business Assistance Initiative.
“The brilliant ideas of the design community are not ours to keep,” Jennifer Goold, executive director of the NDC, told Baltimore Magazine. “From the beginning, we wanted to share these concepts with others—to show how the resilience and wisdom of Baltimore can be an asset in times of challenges.”
