Redefining Wellness in the Face of Pandemic

At Gensler, our mission is to leverage the power of design to create a better world. At the heart of this mission is the concept of resilience, which recognizes that design must constantly evolve, adapting to and preparing for a changing world.

In the face of pandemic, we realize how essential and powerful these aims are. The COVID-19 crisis is causing us to redefine all our work around the concept of wellness and re-examine the importance of resilience. How can we better help our cities, our businesses, and our communities to better adapt and prepare for crises like these? How can our work create a better world by improving the safety, health, and experience of everyone?

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” This goes beyond just minimizing risk by promoting a positive state of wellness in all its forms.

In the current state of the world, Gensler is rethinking the impact of our work around three scales of wellness:

Climate change is the largest scale of impact, affecting everyone on the planet, and buildings are responsible for nearly half of the annual greenhouse emissions that have caused climate change. Last fall, we announced the Gensler Cities Climate Challenge (GC3), our plan to achieve carbon neutrality in all our work within the next decade. In recent years, we have made great strides in this direction: for example, last year our work was designed to prevent over 16 million metric tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere every year — the equivalent of taking 3.5 million cars off the road forever. By continuing our progress, we can contribute significantly to the health of the entire planet and everyone on it.

The COVID-19 crisis is severely disrupting the global economy and threatening people’s lives and livelihoods. Ironically, the virus is also having unintended benefits. After the first month of China’s downshift, its major cities showed a dramatic improvement in air quality. Satellite data has shown reductions in pollution across China, Italy, and South Korea since the outbreak started. And in car-dependent U.S. cities such as Los Angeles, traffic on roads and highways has fallen dramatically. Even if these reductions in carbon emissions rebound when people return to work, school, and travel, the short-term environmental impact that is already evident underscores the possibility — and the urgency  — of taking concrete steps to make real progress toward climate action.

While shelter-in-place has been motivated by public safety, it is enhancing public health in other aspects. According to the WHO, 4.6 million people die every year from causes directly attributed to air pollution. One lesson we can take from this pandemic is that creating more walkable, dense, mixed-use cities where live, work, and play all happen in close proximity can reduce dependence on cars and curtail emissions while also strengthening local communities by creating more opportunity for social interaction and time with family.

As of the past decade, for the first time in human history, more people live in cities than don’t. Buildings are the armature of our social interaction and more