Rebirth of the Old City
Things They Forgot To Tell Me In Business School

Summary: Urban planning geek post. While we suffer in the grips of a global pandemic today, the world will eventually return to a «new normal» tomorrow, the question is how new and how normal. Identifying behaviors/ systems that need to change in our cities is easy, picking those susceptible to significant permanent change due to the impetus of this event is difficult.

Nothing focuses the mind like a crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic is delivering. The reality of overflowing hospitals, temporary morgues, empty shelves, and long unemployment lines made longer by social distancing appearing basically overnight is shocking. And not just in hot spots or previously benighted areas but pretty much everywhere around the world. And it is this everywhereness that sets the current crisis apart from other disasters of the last century other than world war. 

Another unique characteristic of this crisis is that the most effective defense is the forced inactivity of the many to assist the frantic activity of the few.  Huge numbers of people, those not directly involved in either combating or succumbing to the pandemic, are currently restricted in their activities and movements, reduced to watching events unfold and staying out of the way. This forced pause, and the time it creates before the misery it will ultimately cause, has led to a flurry of big thinking by professionals and pundits not immediately concerned for their own survival about how such a defining event will indelibly change their world.

Forecasting the future impact of an event during the actual event itself has obvious drawbacks, but never have there been so many great minds twiddling their thumbs trying to stay busy while waiting for doom to strike, or not. More than enough time to exercise the latest global hobsession of the fortunate, thinking about how to increase our preparedness both as individuals and as societies.

Things have to change! Armed with pent-up energy and transitory clarity, there is a tendency in us all to overestimate the momentum of the forces that wrought changes to individual and group behavior at the height of this pandemic, and to believe that these changes will carry on past the end of the boiling crisis. After the gut-wrenching fear recedes, a fog of conflicting priorities will descend, accumulated frictions wrought during the emergency will start to bite, and the smothering forces of inertia otherwise prevalent will reassert themselves. 

The world will eventually return to a «new normal», the question is how new and how normal. Identifying behaviors/ systems that need to change in our cities is easy, picking those susceptible to significant permanent change due to the impetus of this event is difficult.

Which is why, faut de mieux, there is some value in all this navel-gazing beyond simply combating fear and staving off boredom. Setting initial priorities now, when the light is good, has value; when the world creaks and stumbles back into motion there will be a short window of opportunity to «strike while the iron is hot» and implement changes quickly before new events and concerns overtake us and interest wanes.  

Everyone looks at life through their own prism and urbanists are no exception [here lumping together all urban oracles such as urban planners, urban designers, sociologists, economists, futurologists, etc. ]. Cities are the «hot spots» of civilization in all senses and they both reflect and guide deeper changes in society.   

How will cities be changed forever in light of the current pandemic crisis? 

A shortlist of candidates for COVID-19 driven changes to urban life as we recently knew include the following: 

Big Brother - Rise of the Surveillance City? The final pieces of technology to track every external aspect of our lives have been in place now for several years. Digital health, finance, banking and tax records, social media, and e-commerce data are old friends more easily accessible than ever, while now omnipresent cctv with facial recognition in urban areas and the ever-present mobile phone tracking have been welcomed to the party. What was lacking in «open and democratic» societies was the normalization of its use for anything other than highly targeted instances and highly invasive but decentralized commercial purposes. Mass systematic surveillance of entire populations was the preserve of nasty autocratic regimes who imprisoned their minorities. With the precedent of COVID-19, this will change. Measures will be implemented to normalize the use of consolidated individual profiling data at a mass scale for public health and safety purposes in open and democratic nations. The effectiveness of authorities in certain nations in containing the outbreak by applying all the information technology tools at their disposal to discipline populations will be taken as a precedent. This is a sure thing. Say Hello to Surveillance City, Where We Are Watching You Now More Than Ever! 

Working From Home - Goodbye Office Drones? Will the current forced diet of working from home,  or WFH, become the norm for many of the 30% or so of employees able to do so [US Bureau of Labor Statistics]? Workers revel in the flexibility and absence of commuting while employers eyeball significant office cost savings. For cities, the spin-off benefits of reducing peak-hour traffic congestion will be huge, and the structural impact of changed habits significant. In the short to mid-term, having employers shrink their office footprints even 10-25% will lead to the need for large structural adjustments. City centers will be re-born, again, and suburban office parks will need a massive rethink. Queue further rounds of mixed-use condo conversions? Working from home, a trend to continue watching, same same again but different, but likely not the overnight revolution it appears to be today.

Schooling From Home - Mainstream Education Goes Mobile? With schools around the world pivoting to remote education to complete the 2020 school year there is much speculation that the physical school as we know it could become a relic of the past. The role of e-learning, and creating individualized learning paths for all students that, almost incidentally, are also mobile, is a cornerstone of progressive education already. But schools provide value far beyond the lessons for both individuals and communities which will make them a lot stickier than the textbooks they used to house. Simple logistics and crowd control will also help ensure the role of the brick and mortar school in most locations for the foreseeable future as in normal times parents work and children need oversight. While the momentum is towards full e-learning autonomy, it is the integration of individualized digital tools with group-centered activities that will be the sane answer as we are not just educating children but raising little humans.

Clean Air - Blue Sky Thinking and The Right to Fresh Air?  One of the positive collateral impacts of the steep decline in mobility and economic activity in the last several months has been a notable improvement to local air and water quality conditions in many of the largest urban areas of the world. Blue skies and clear waters are reappearing where they had been long forgotten clear and visible to everyone in the population. While the relatively pristine conditions of today will not be maintained when activity ramps back toward normal,  environmental protection activities will receive huge impetus in the short term with the opportunity to push for significant structural changes.  

Operative Windows: A small sidebar to the clean air thing, but will there be another building built without natural ventilation? The importance of operative windows and clean air exchange in buildings has shown itself to be paramount, despite complications in tall buildings and the permissiveness of certain building codes.  

Urban Density - Flight to the `Burbs? Will the recent flow of people into densely populated central cities become a flight out as the public flees the dense urban centers for the notional safety of the more sparsely populated periphery? It is difficult to socially distance in an elevator. While leaving the city is simply not an option for most people in the world, it may be a relevant trend in certain higher-end markets and limited demographics.  

Urban Mobility - Death of Transit? Does COVID-19 spell the death of mass transit? Will the close confines of the bus or train prove too much, keeping car ownership rates high and rising and boosting ride-hail services when the car is not an option? And what of our favorite personal mobility device, the bicycle, will we pedal our way into the future with our new e-bikes? While there will almost certainly be a temporary damping effect on transit use as people have lingering distrust, over time it will remain the only viable option in denser central cities and for many people. We may, however, be heading toward a long period of masked transit.

Urban Food Security - Hungry for Change? This crisis again demonstrates how precarious the food supply systems that keep cities stocked really are. It should come as no surprise that cities do not feed themselves, in fact, the entire point of a city is to free up people from having to feed themselves so they can do other things. But when the supply lines from the outside are cut acute shortages in key product categories - foods, medicines, fuel - begin to hit within just days not weeks or months [www.trucking.org]. While the issue of urban food insecurity isn’t going away anytime soon, look for increased emphasis on shortening supply chains, local production, and strategic stockpiling as ways to recalibrate the balance between resilience and commercial efficiency. 

These are but a sampling of the headline issues brought into stark relief today that may prove susceptible to long-term change tomorrow in order to increase our preparedness both as individuals and societies. Or, as my father might have said, to help us better prepare next time for the last war.