Warm Hospitality: Making Outdoor Spaces Work in Winter
By Mark Bennett
Here in Chicago, winter lasts anywhere from 3-6 months (depending on who you ask). And every year, as it approaches, a familiar attitude emerges—let’s hunker down and hope for it all to end early. But is accepting misery any way to live?
Look at most planning documents, and you won’t find many mentions of winter. The result is cities that can become pretty unpleasant spaces when the temperature drops, sunlight disappears and the wind picks up. We need to start putting more thought into how we plan and design our cities for winter livability. We don’t have to hide from the season and wait for it to be over.
Cities that don’t intentionally incorporate winter planning and design can see loneliness, isolation, lack of activity and increased difficult accessing food and healthcare. All of these issues are intensified for our aging neighbors, neighbors with disabilities and neighbors who live in communities faced with generations of underinvestment.
Winter planning and design has come to the forefront with the COVID-19 pandemic. We adapted this summer by spending more time outside, where the probability of transmission is lower. But now we’re left searching for ways to stop the spread as the temperature drops. This is an urgent public health issue; COVID-19 has taken hundreds of thousands of American lives and continues to disproportionately harm our Black and Brown communities.
For business owners, COVID-19 is also a critical economic challenge. For the last couple months, I’ve been working with the City Open Workshop and a volunteer team of designers, architects and engineers to develop guidance for local restaurants to safely welcome guests in the winter. Every business has different opportunities, constraints and budgets—to recommend one or two solutions is a difficult task. But what we can do is establish key design principles that will help people better enjoy being outdoors in the winter—principles that can apply far beyond just restaurants.
Wind Protection: Wind is the difference between a brisk day and a miserable one. Perhaps even more important than bringing in artificial heat, vertical protection from the wind can make sitting outside much more enjoyable.
Light: It gets dark in the winter, and additional light makes outdoor spaces more pleasant.
Color: When we lose plantings and days turn cloudy, bringing color back to spaces is important. This can come through lighting, artwork, furniture or even painting walls.
Shelter: Humans are conditioned to seek shelter for safety; we tend to prefer edges and protection. Trees provide shelter in the warmer months, but when the leaves fall off, a street can feel much more exposed. Overhead shelter can be added with awnings, art pieces or even just string lights.
Many restaurants will continue to welcome patrons by creatively utilizing our streets. But there are a few critical winter-specific considerations when using street space for dining:
We must keep clear travel paths open for our neighbors with disabilities. Any solution that makes it more difficult for someone to pass through should be a non-starter.
We need to be careful in winter about closing streets that force bus re-routes. Many permanent bus stops lack basic dignity in the best weather and only get worse in winter. Temporary bus stops lacking proper infrastructure and maintenance plans are worse yet.
Snow has to go somewhere—make sure planning for dining in the public right-of-way includes space for snow to ensure it doesn’t end up packed in bike lanes and sidewalk
Finally, embracing winter is all about perspective. Cold doesn’t have to be bad, and winter isn’t one continuous polar vortex—in Chicago, 70% of days between December-February warm up past 30 degrees. That’s cold, but not so cold that it’s impossible to enjoy spending time outdoors. This is a moment to test new attitudes about spending time in winter outdoors. It is also time to have a long-overdue conversation about planning and designing our cities for winter livability.