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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Are cities to blame for Covid-19?
Are Cities to Blame for COVID-19?
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
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Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Until recently, many experts prophesied an urban future but now the pandemic has made that future less clear or, more precisely, the definition of urban more problematic. Covid-19 has upended our fundamental relationship with the city. But even if Covid-19 had not done so, it is time to re-imagine our fundamental relationship with the city anyway. Covid-19 has just shone the spotlight on to the problem.
BY LLEWELLYN VAN WYK, B.ARCH; MSC. (APPLIED), URBAN ANALYST
Acentral theme arising out of the pandemic is whether Covid-19 signals the death of the city. As Tony Matthews puts it: “Many urban dwellers are redefining their sense of place in response to Covid-19. We may not view our cities the same way after this pandemic. Our perceptions and priorities may change, perhaps permanently. As we start planning for cities after this pandemic, we should recognise this task is as much philosophical as practical.” 1
Pandemics do challenge existing perceptions, values, and paradigms about the meaning of progress, modernity, and success. Covid-19 is no different and is also challenging prevailing perceptions about urban life. When a major global shock occurs, such as Covid-19 (or 9/11, or potentially future climate change related events), it fundamentally challenges all orthodoxy by stressing hitherto covert systemic fault lines, which are unable to withstand the unleashed forces.
Bruce Schaller perhaps sums it up best when, in the CityLab, he writes, “The oldest trope in America is back: Cities are bad. Cities mean density and density means human contact, and human contact, in the crucible of the pandemic, means illness and death.” The problem, he writes, is not cities and density.2
David Madden too observes that cities are once again being cast as threats to public health and social order and that some commentators believe there will be a mass exodus from cities, a trend accelerated by home working, and that large, dense cities are no longer viable.
Samuel Kling, a Global Cities Fellow at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, notes the long history of blaming urban areas rather than economic factors for physical and moral ills.3 But, he argues, density can be an asset for fighting coronavirus. He argues that the diagnosis of Covid-19 as a uniquely urban problem reflects historical tropes about the dangers of urban space more than current evidence. Citing statistical analysis, he argues that there is not a consistent connection between big-city density and coronavirus impacts.
On the contrary, he points out that some of the world’s most heavily settled spaces – Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore – have proved to be the most formidable at containing Covid-19 while in the US, as an example, small towns in Georgia and Louisiana suffer along with New York City. He argues that the demonisation of density harkens to the heyday of urbanisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when American civic leaders and reformers of the time embraced the notion that urban social problems – disease, poverty, immorality – stemmed from the physical environments of cities.
This ideology of “moral environmentalism,” as historian Alexander von Hoffman termed it, formed the foundation of US urban planning
and reform for decades. Now, he thinks, this legacy is re-emerging with coronavirus, threatening, as it did in recent urban history, to lead to distorted, ideological responses that malign city life and obscure the root of the problem.
He concedes that while crowded tenements and inhumane conditions did indeed have deleterious effects on residents, the moral environmentalists tended to blame urban spaces while neglecting the economic system that created these spaces. He argues that the moralists believed that if changing the urban environment could solve urban social problems, the economic system of industrialisation could be left intact.
Therefore, he argues, a standard method for improving impoverished, overcrowded urban neighbourhoods was simply to demolish them. He notes that while some urban voices argued for the building of urban parks to solve urban problems, the weaknesses of this reform vision – and its strengths – found clear expression in the era’s public parks movement, which touched cities across the country in the late 19th century.
Landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Eliot, and Jens Jensen, sought to solve urban social problems through the reform of urban space. They imagined parks as a vital source of fresh air and naturalistic beauty – features that take on special gravity in cities now under lockdown. But they also treated parkland as a mechanism for solving cities’ thorniest social problems. Critically, parks, predicated on the idea that space was the problem, did not address the larger system that created inhumane urban spaces in the first place.
Urban park advocates embraced careful design because they viewed aesthetic reform as a tool for social reform. It was Olmsted, the movement’s leader, who stated that the reasons disease and misery and vice and crime has been much greater in towns could be attributed to a lack of fresh air
and the constant stimulation of bustling city life. In his view, only “relief from” city life could return residents to “a temperate, good-natured, and healthy state of mind.”
Olmsted viewed urban life as a threat to “the mind and the moral strength” of residents. This aesthetic, rather than ecological approach to urban parks ironically resulted in park landscapes that were in and of
themselves artificial: hills levelled and built up, ponds dug, and existing vegetation replaced with thousands of foreign and native plants. The objective never was ecological: in reformist thinking, creating naturalistic spaces could improve public health alongside civic health, and cure physical ailments together with moral ones. They believed they could quell the threat of social disorder by providing a structured, common space for cities’ motley populations.
Some contemporaries of the time took their belief in parks’ healing powers to improbable lengths: As historian Paul Boyer writes, one park administrator claimed in a popular reform journal that with a bigger parks budget, he could decrease prostitution in his city by 98%. But here is the critical issue: convinced that the environment was both disease and cure, park builders put their faith in spatial reform, not structural reform. More direct interventions – such as social housing, robust regulatory protections, and the elements of a welfare state – had to wait for reformers with different worldviews.
Tracy Loh and Charles Leinberger identify three natural enemies of urbanism: crime, terrorism, and pandemics. In the 1970s and 1980s, they note, crime seemed like an existential threat to American cities. In the 2000s, it was terrorism. Today they suggest it is pandemics, especially as Covid-19 sweeps across the country’s dense urban areas.4 For many people, these three cases provoke a fear of cities, especially the dense clustering of diverse populations. This fear can, they suggest, prevent decision-makers from understanding and implementing solutions to those problems. Fear can distort the market, leading public, private, and philanthropic sectors to fail to invest their money into the right places. And more critically, given the events in Atlanta in June 2020, they add that fear of cities feeds racism.
But looking at the real dynamics of crime, terrorism, and pandemics, one can see that, many times, this fear is misplaced. The actual relationship between urbanism and threats of crime, terrorism, and pandemics is not a straight and simple line. Noting the prevalence of Covid-19 cases in places such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago – urban counties that are the heart of the US economy – it is easy to conclude that the pandemic is primarily a big city problem.
They point out that when cases are mapped per capita instead of by absolute number, a different story emerges. Los Angeles and Chicago are simply places that have a lot of people, and thus more Covid-19 cases. More tellingly they note that the spread of the virus is driven by crowding behaviour, not just density, which is why there have been major outbreaks in rural areas such as Blaine County, Idaho, and Albany in Georgia.
They point to rural areas suffering relatively higher death rates from the virus because their hospital systems are quickly overwhelmed and their populations are underinsured, older, and have more underlying health conditions, which is all consistent with how the typical annual influenza affects the United States. They make the argument that cities, suburbs, and rural areas can all be affected by Covid-19.
Regardless of size or density, all places need to invest in the qualities that build resiliency. While fear of cities regarding pandemics may be misplaced, they suggest that the solutions to such crises can have a place everywhere. They remind us that Covid-19 is not the only crisis we are facing – climate change, regional divergence, and our aging population also call for more transformative placemaking.
So, what lessons will today’s city leaders take away from the pandemic? As in the past, the answer partly depends on how they diagnose the problem. If they follow the precedent of moral environmentalism, they will fault the city itself. But doing so distorts the reality of the pandemic and obscures the systemic policy failures that have made certain places and populations – particularly the marginalised – far more vulnerable.
A dense urban environment can be an asset in fighting disasters like Covid-19. Density means cities can more easily concentrate resources and social services where needed. Residents, in theory, have quicker access to hospitals and healthcare. And when nurtured by “social infrastructure” – community centres, libraries, and yes, public parks – cities can generate lifesaving networks of social ties which combat isolation and mitigate the effects of disasters. Building on these strengths can make cities more humane and resilient in the pandemic’s aftermath.
As Covid-19 enlarges the window of policy possibilities, city leaders should remember their problem is the virus, not urban life. They can improve their public health and transportation infrastructure by learning from the dense places that have managed to avoid the harshest impacts of the virus. They can strengthen the social infrastructure that serves as a first line of defence against pandemics, supporting neighbourhood institutions to promote cohesiveness while allowing for distance. They can tailor their responses to meet the threat of climate catastrophe, which cities – for all their flaws – remain best positioned to address. They can relieve the deeprooted inequality that has contributed to Covid-19’s uneven urban spread.
More critically, while cities are vulnerable amid the pandemic, they are not the problem. Recognising that fact is the first step, to addressing coronavirus on its own terms, as it appears not just in cities, but also in suburb and countryside – and to building a more resilient, humane urban life afterward.
REFERENCES
1 Ibid. 2 Schaller, B. 2020. “Density isn’t easy. But it’s necessary.” CityLab, May 4, 2020. .
3 Kling, Samuel. 2020. “Is the city itself the problem?” CityLab, April 20, 2020. . 4 Loh, T. and Leinberger, C. 2020. “How fears of cities can blind us from solutions to Covid-19.” .
