Environmental Role of Open Space in Infection and Disease Control

Abstract

The increasing awareness of infection control by design during the pandemic has revived the idea of the open environment as the preferable condition for everyday activities. This chapter explores the idea of open learning spaces as a key aspect of post-pandemic school design. The increasing need to maximize access to the outdoor space during the COVID-19 pandemic creates opportunities for rethinking the school design, in particular to optimize the use of outdoor spaces as the important settings for learning. School design needs to depart from the approach that prioritizes the enclosed learning spaces inside the buildings and promotes the use of outdoor spaces as preferable learning settings. However, it is necessary to understand both the benefits and the problems related to the use of outdoor spaces as a learning environment. The school design needs to negotiate the degree of openness in the school design as an approach to create the appropriate open learning spaces that will benefit both health and educational purposes and address various conflicting properties of open learning spaces. The spatial configuration that offers an appropriate balance between openness and enclosure becomes an important key feature of post-pandemic school design. This approach inevitably leads to some further implications in the practice of school design, in particular the shifting programming of learning spaces, the shifting criteria in the school space standards, and the emerging types and vocabularies of learning spaces.