COVID-19 and the Future of Urbanism
Daniel Watchorn | June 20, 2020
The past few months have been some of the most tumultuous in recent memory. In many parts of the world, the impacts of the virus have fundamentally altered how we live our day-to-day lives. Virtually every component of the City that is important to us was changed in some manner; restaurants and bars were closed, public transit service was reduced, parks were taped off - the list goes on. Of course, the measures that were put in place make good sense, something had to be done to slow the spread of the virus. But the longer this goes on (Months? Years?), the more one has to wonder; if the amenities that attract us to cities are being reduced, revised, or shut down, why bother living in the city anymore?
This is not a new thought - since the beginning of the lockdown in North America, numerous articles have been published citing how various different groups are preparing their respective escapes from the city. Bloomberg reported that millenials are now reconsidering their disdain for the suburbs. Traditionally, young adults have had the strongest incentive among all age groups to move to large cities. The clusters of people and activity that make up cities provide the greatest opportunities to meet people, advance careers, and enjoy cultural events. The desirability of these clusters leads to downsides that must be acknowledged; higher costs of living, congestion, reduced access to nature, etc. Since the lockdown has eliminated a significant number of the benefits of living in the city, even if temporarily, the "worth it?" calculus shifts. Many careers are moving towards either partially or completely remote work, dating apps are now the leading method for entering into new romantic relationships, and even art galleries are moving online. So, if you can experience virtually all of the benefits of the city, well, virtually, it begs the question: why bother living in the city?
The older and wealthier among us are looking to leave cities as well. Once again, the rise of teleworking enables a greater flexibility for the choice of residence, even for the managers and executives of the world. Many among this demographic don't need the excitement and opportunity that the city has to offer anymore, so are looking to locations that would better suit a more relaxed lifestyle. Since their work doesn't tie them to the city anymore, and neither does their lifestyle, there's no longer any strong reason to stay.
Coupled with individuals looking to alter their lifestyles, businesses, too, are rethinking what their place in the city might look like. A number of major employers, including Shopify, for example have publicly stated their intentions to have their workforce permanently work remotely. A driving force in the economy of a city is its office buildings. These buildings can only drive the economy, however, when there are people working in them. It is a very common attribute in North American cities to have downtowns that are essentially entirely comprised of just offices and supporting service uses (yes this is an oversimplification).When the office uses are removed from the equation, there is no longer a critical mass of people downtown, so those service uses collapse almost immediately. If this trend continues, it will create a strong negative feedback loop for the attractiveness of downtown spaces for employers. If fewer workers are coming downtown, more services will close due to a lack of demand, so the convenience of proximity is reduced. There will then be less incentive to have a downtown office, and even greater numbers of employers will close down those office locations.
When a negative feedback loop like this is created, it traditionally takes a significant government intervention to stop the loop and correct the trend. The most common example of this would be public transportation systems. For public transportation, it often begins with an underfunded system, the service will worsen, then ridership drops due to the poor service, so revenue falls, and service has to be cut to deal with the reduced revenue, so ridership continues to fall, etc. It takes a major intervention from the local government to stop this decline - be it a major re-investment in maintenance, new lines, new vehicles, or whatever works in the local context. Without this intervention, the decline continues indefinitely.
Major government intervention can also occur with land use and property development. A common example of this would be for cities to institute development charge/levy rebates within the downtown area to encourage new development. Another option would be to implement property tax grants, reductions, or incentives for downtown properties to make it cheaper to operate there. Concerns regarding the equity and administration of these policies aside - cities that institute these policies generally have to be on a reasonably sound financial footing to enact them. They will often be foregoing tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in order to spur economic activity. Unfortunately, cities are finding themselves in extremely weak financial positions as a result of the policies they had to institute to fight against the spread of the virus, so their flexibility in enacting these policies is greatly reduced.
Furthermore, policies advising employers on how to update their office protocols encourage certain actions to be taken that don't mesh well with the traditional challenges of downtown office space. The CDC guidelines for "COVID-19 Employer Information for Office Buildings" details various steps that employers should be taking to reduce the spread of the virus. In terms of physical design, the guidelines encourage desks to be more spaced out, to separate meeting and break rooms, and update ventilation and HVAC equipment. While these policies are understandable, they would generally require employers to lease more office space than they currently do to accommodate their workforce, if they are intending on keeping the same number of employees in their offices. Considering how expensive space is in downtown offices compared to suburban offices, this could further encourage employers to rethink their use of downtown office space.
Author's note: while writing this article the guidelines encouraged employers to incentivize their employees to drive to work alone, and to pay for employee parking. These were then updated to be somewhat more "urbanist friendly" to now state: If feasible, offer employees incentives to use forms of transportation that minimize close contact with others (e.g., biking, walking, driving or riding by car either alone or with household members).
This seems like a perfect storm of factors coming together to kill the modern city as we know it. If both people and employers are seriously reconsidering if major cities are where they should be, there could be a slow and steady exodus that would fundamentally alter how we design and treat our cities. In fact, this would not be a new phenomenon. Public health crises have had significant influence over urban planning over the course of history. While a number of the interventions into city design and public policy were ill-informed due to the lack of understanding of virus and disease transmission, the point remains that significant efforts were taken to try and change the city to address these issues. In some cases, breakthroughs in understanding were made by linking the city, its geography, and disease transmission.
Due to the democratic nature of modern city planning, the will of the people is much more likely to be implemented now than ever before, even if it is ill advised. People are growing increasingly weary that urban density exacerbates the transmission of COVID-19. While this could have an influence, the fact that major cities across the world are having radically different experiences with the virus shows, at a minimum, that this is a very nuanced issue. In fact, early data is pointing to this being another in a very long list of public health issues that are more strongly correlated with socioeconomics than anything else. However, it is often very difficult to convince people to agree with science/data based approaches to city planning, especially on topics that may be counter-intuitive.
Urbanists have been trying for decades to alter the public perception regarding the suburbs. It is completely clear from an academic perspective that North American auto-oriented suburbs are not successful urban forms. Yet, suburban development has continued. While demand to live in cities, rather than suburbs, has improved significantly over the past 10 years, there has still been growth in the suburbs. Now that there is another new reason for people to think that they should be relocating (back?) to the suburbs, and suburban growth has maintained a reasonable pace, it is plausible that a large suburban flight could happen all over again.
Of course, this may not happen at all. A vaccine could be developed sooner, rather than later, and this pandemic will become just another memory. Or, public health officials may be able to more accurately predict how the virus spreads, and so urbanists could create solutions that enable the city as we know it to continue by implementing those solutions.
It is too early to tell how exactly this is going to play out, especially because city planning happens on a very long term scale. However, what we can say for certain is that, perhaps more than ever before, urbanists will have to be on their toes and be ready to respond to a potentially significant shift in public perception of the City.