Community Connections
THE FUTURE OF BY KATHLEEN HOLDER
T
he recent pandemic set new demographic trends in motion for cities around the globe as offices closed down and remote work became widespread. Downtown business districts in cities like San Francisco and New York were hit hard as affluent residents, remote workers and the newly jobless left for smaller communities or to live closer to friends and relatives. One study found that high-income areas in large U.S. cities lost 15% to 20% of residents in the pandemic’s early months. Cities in the San Francisco East Bay Area and Sacramento, on the other hand, saw more people move in than leave — a pattern that some migration experts say predates COVID-19, but has since accelerated. Overall, people are moving from major metro areas to the suburbs and beyond. Is this the moment to reimagine our urban environments? We asked two scholars in the College of Letters and Science for their perspectives on the state of cities and the prospects for creating spaces that, rather than divide us, build community and provide safer places to work, live and play. Here are excerpts from interviews with: n
Simon Sadler, professor and chair of design who studies the history and theory of architecture, design and architecture.
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Julie Sze, a professor of American studies whose research focuses on environmental justice and inequalities and the relationship between social movements and policy implementation.
SIMON SADLER
Planning for diversity
A big takeaway from the pandemic, and the associated strife that we’ve seen over the past year or two, is a heightened awareness of the intersecting crises of climate change, structural racism and cultural division. A famous book — which, thanks to the pandemic, we will be reading yet again — is Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It seems so obvious in retrospect, but Jane Jacobs said all these things we’re doing with cities — zoning, displacing people, making way for highways — are crazy, unjust and killing cities. Urban 8
UC DAVIS COLLEGE OF LETTERS AND SCIENCE
