A pause has been forced on urban life. Quiet roads, empty skies, deserted high streets and parks, closed cinemas, cafés and museums – a break in the spending and work frenzy so familiar to us all. The reality of lockdown is making ghost towns of the places we once knew. Everything we know about our…
A pause has been forced on urban life. Quiet roads, empty skies, deserted high streets and parks, closed cinemas, cafés and museums – a break in the spending and work frenzy so familiar to us all. The reality of lockdown is making ghost towns of the places we once knew. Everything we know about our urban world has come to a shuddering halt. For now.
The lockdown will, at some point, end. Urban life will begin to hum again to the familiar rhythms of work, leisure and shopping. This will be a huge relief for us all. Yet our towns and cities will never be the same. Indeed, things might get worse before they get better.
But it’s also the case that other crises haven’t gone away. Our relatively brief lockdown won’t solve longer-term urban problems: dependence on fossil fuels, rising carbon emissions, poor air quality, dysfunctional housing markets, loss of biodiversity, divisions between the rich and the poor, low paid work. These are going to need our attention again.
The coronavirus crisis has offered a new perspective on these problems – and the limits of the way we have run our urban world over the last few decades. Cities are key nodes in our complex and highly connected global society, facilitating the rapid flow of people, goods and money, the rise of corporate wealth and the privatization of land, assets and basic services. This has brought gains for some through foreign travel, an abundance of consumer products, inward investment and steady economic growth.
But we are now seeing a flip side to this globalized urban world. A densely connected world can quickly turn a localized disease into a pandemic; large areas of the economy are run by large corporates who don’t always meet basic public needs; land and resources can lie empty for years; and low paid workers in the informal or gig economy can be left exposed with little protection.
This model has the perfect conditions for creating a crisis like coronavirus. It’s also really bad at dealing with it. So something else is required to guide us into the future. The old story – in which cities compete against one another to improve their place in the global pecking order – was never great at meeting everyone’s needs. But now it’s looking very risky, given the need for increased cooperation and local resilience.
After coronavirus, a key question emerges: what in essence, is a city for? Is it to pursue growth, attract inward investment and compete against global rivals? Or is it to maximize quality of life for all, build local resilience and sustainability? These are not always mutually exclusive, but it’s a question of regaining balance. Beyond politics and ideology, most people simply want to be safe and healthy, especially faced by future threats, be they climate, weather or virus related.
Over the last 20 years as an urban geographer, I have been learning what needs to change to make cities more sustainable, green, fair and accessible. Recently, I described this in a book alongside a guide for civic leaders on how to tackle the climate emergency. Now, the lockdown has thrown us all into a real-time laboratory full of living examples of what a more sustainable future might look like. We have a perfect opportunity to study and explore which of these could be locked in to build sustainable, and safer, cities.
This has already started. Many things have become possible in the last few weeks. In many places, rapid changes have been unleashed to control the economy, health, transport and food. We are surrounded by fragments of progressive urban policy: eviction cancellations, nationalized services, free transport and healthcare, sick pay and wage guarantees. There is also a flourishing of community-based mutual aid networks as people volunteer to help the most vulnerable with daily tasks. Yesterday’s radical ideas are becoming today’s pragmatic choices.
We can learn a lot from these crisis-led innovations as we create more permanent urban policy choices to make life more pleasant and safer for all. Below I discuss a few key areas of city life that are currently providing some options.
Many people around the world are currently surrounded by much quieter streets. This presents us with a huge opportunity to re-imagine and lock in a different kind of urban mobility. Some cities are already doing so: Milan, for example, has announced that it will turn 35km of streets over to cyclists and pedestrians after the crisis.
Streets with fewer cars have shown people what more liveable, walkable neighborhoods would look like. When lockdown is over and society returns to the huge task of reducing transport emissions and improving air quality, we need to remember that lower car use quickly became the new normal. This is important. Reducing traffic levels, some say by up to 60% between now and 2030, may be key to avoiding dangerous levels of global warming.
As I have previously outlined, this reduction would address many longstanding urban policy concerns – the erosion of public space, debt, the shift to out of town retail centers and the decline of local high streets, road deaths and casualties, poor air quality and growing carbon emissions. Accessible, affordable, zero-carbon, public transport is key to supporting a less car dependent urban future.
This crisis has revealed the significant inequalities in people’s ability to move about cities. In many countries, including my own (the UK), deregulation and privatization has facilitated corporate operators to run bits of the transport system in the interest of shareholders rather than users. Millions face transport poverty, where they can’t afford to own and run a car, and lack access to affordable mass transit options. This has taken a new twist during this crisis. For many vulnerable people, whether there is a transit system to access hospitals, food and other essential services can be a matter of life or death.
