The General Question:

How do we get from here to there?
(one at which humans excell)

"Way finding" is a handy term for the process

Reflecting on a map draft Kate produced yesterday:

Territory and landscape history well known to me, amply documented/summarized in Walter Muir Whitehill's Boston: A Topographical History.
Cutting down the 3 hills to fill in the tidal flats (shovels, oxcarts); eventually steam power, bringing gravel from Needham by rail to fill Back Bay...

They got from the 1775 'there' to the 20th c. 'here' in a series of steps and decisions, via obstacles recognized and ways found to surmount, plans made and re-made, designs formulated and abandoned and superceded, investments public and private in the eventual engineered success. 

....

and there's an obvious parallel to garden-making: sod removed and piled into a mound; sod sifted to recover the dirt for a base layer in beds; loam-compost mix sifted and blanketed over that base; cold frame and deer exclusion devices developed and evolved...

....

and the very current question (which we may or may n ot get to) of how to get from the here-and-now of limited movement and businesses on hold to an eventual state of reopenness (the new patterns and altered circumstances difficult to predict). More worthwhile to look at what the issues are than to chart a specific path. A couple of resources to look at:

Vi Hart http://vihart.com/ is a "a self-described 'recreational mathemusician' who is well known for creating mathematical videos on YouTube". https://boingboing.net/2020/04/21/vi-hart-explains-the-four-phas.html is her 13-minute summary of a 56-page "Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience" from Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics https://ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-for-ethics/files/roadmaptopandemicresilience_updated_4.20.20.pdf

The sticky point is "contact tracing", for which see https://vitals.lifehacker.com/what-is-contact-tracing-1842984055 and https://www.newscientist.com/article/2241041-there-are-many-reasons-why-covid-19-contact-tracing-apps-may-not-work/  and https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/10/831200054/cdc-director-very-aggressive-contact-tracing-needed-for-u-s-to-return-to-normal