FEATURE
COVID-19 AND LOCKDOWN The Estates team at Regent’s quickly recognised that a dynamic approach was needed to address the impact of COVID-19 lockdown in late March. Their people and systems were very quickly mobilised to provide online teaching before the focus moved on to providing safe environments for students, staff and visitors, for when they begin to, and then fully re-open. Initially a detailed exercise of mapping out the entire campus for social/ physical distancing was carried out. One-way routes around campus were quickly plotted and agreed, signage was ordered and in place. A first pass, adhering to two- metre distancing, quickly followed by a second exercise to identify one-metre ‘plus’ distancing was developed for the University’s timetabling managers. This enabled them to establish what teaching capacities could be safely delivered upon return to campus and formed the foundation to their campus re-opening plans. The timetabling team plays a pivotal role in all space re- planning exercises.
“A sticky campus encompasses everything from the aspects of physical design, what it looks like, the quality of the air and
light, to the timetabling, and the amount of time needed to travel between rooms.”
Regent’s welcomed some students and staff back late September for limited academic contact. The University is now working with them to review and re-examine what works well, and what improvements or adjustments need making as they prepare for a fuller re-opening of the campus in January 2021.
Further reviews will continue as government guidelines change and we move through the stages of the pandemic. A sticky campus encompasses everything from the aspects of physical design, what it looks like, the quality of the air and light, to the timetabling and the amount of time needed to travel between rooms. The sticky bit aims to keep people on-site, on campus, as long as possible, because that’s where they learn more.
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The new plan involved analysing all of the rooms, and producing a report which showed how many people they could get into each room, so that they could start planning a timetable. Knowing that you could previously accommodate 40 people in a room, but only 15 now, has a huge impact on timetabling. With knowledge of the campus and how the departments work, we devised a plan for the whole campus involving one-way routes, capacity of rooms, signage and policies on use of toilets to limit lots of people going into these places.
The sticky campus concept works very well on post-COVID space planning work, because it’s a holistic approach; it takes the health, safety and wellbeing of the students to the very heart of it, and provides the digital connections to enable blended learning. The masterplan has always helped us to understand the campus and how people move around it. Before the pandemic we could better control that movement and the quantity of people going into certain areas at certain times, by putting certain facilities like coffee points, bean bags or sofas in the right places. By working closely with the timetabling team, we could effectively predict student movement.
Post-COVID this same approach applies, and still works. The objective has always been to make the best use of space on campus. The work on the Blueprint is still ongoing and is likely to continue for some time, however as we go through this journey, and the pandemic, everyone is mindful of the need to operate within a dynamic environment. Those higher-education facilities that are agile enough to use technology well to keep going whilst rethinking their masterplan and space model for the future, will be ones ahead of their competition and thrive after this crisis is over.
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