The pandemic has taken from us certain freedoms, but it has also provided certain liberties. Because social distancing has increased the ratio of people to metres inside restaurants, local governments have taken temporary measures to allow restauranteurs to build curbside structures, like this one at the NW corner of Grant and Commercial Drive, what I first knew as Cafe Le Grec, then later Bukowski's (not sure what it's called now).
These are not intended to be attractive structures but functional ones. Their function is to make money (for the restauranteur), provide tax revenue (for government) and keep servers off CERB (less successful). That this one looks like a cross between Chicago's Union Stockyards and a Nazi concentration camp should give you an idea of where our world is headed.
Human beings are adaptable creatures who have been known to fall in love with their captors. States of exception, if they go on long enough, are no longer exceptional. The Covid virus is the "star" of our pandemic, but as it is in Hollywood, where the studios and their parent companies gain the most from a blockbuster, the pandemic beneficiaries are those who control over 99% of the world's wealth and, in an effort to keep it, are eager to find new methods of social control. "Patio" seating is another kind of blockbuster: an inadvertent architecture, a vision of a dystopian future.
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