City design after the pandemic

Czech Village, May 2020: Where to pee in the post-pandemic world?

In the halcyon days that were the middle of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads... annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I am shamelessly stealing this format as a way of starting to sort through the vast array of writing on how the pandemic will affect the future of cities. Today's topic: city design.

The Urbanist movement in city design has had widespread influence in cities around the world. In my town, the core has eliminated one-way streets, sidewalks have been added to neighborhoods that had been without them for decades, there's a much more extensive network of bike lanes and trails, and two years ago we adopted a form-based zoning code for at least a small part of the city. (On the other hand, we still go in big for large-lot subdivisions, franchises, and shopping plazas on four-lane stroads.) Urbanism seeks, for a variety of reasons, to bring people into closer contact with each other.

All of a sudden, we are in a time when closer contact is the friend of the virus and the enemy of public health. How does that get figured into design? Can we still have street life and third places, or must we (for health or consumer demand reasons) spread out again? How can we have a functioning city while avoiding infections? The following pieces range from anticipating urbanist adaptations to the pandemic to deep levels of concern.

Adie Tomer and Lara Fishbane, "Big City Downtowns Are Booming, But Can Their Momentum Outlast the Coronavirus?" Brookings, 6 May 2020

Mainly an analysis of census data showing continued residential growth in downtown areas of large cities, defined as the central business district and surrounding neighborhoods, and whether this phenomenon can be extended to other neighborhoods in the city--for an extreme example, Chicago's downtown population has grown fivefold since 1980, but the county in which it's located has lost population since 2000--and/or to downtown areas of smaller cities. They conclude, though, by noting the need for cities everywhere to "assuage fears during the coronavirus crisis and build confidence that denser neighborhoods are not threatened by future pandemics." They think they can do this, as the cities' superior infrastructure and concentration of assets will continue to attract residents and businesses, and they have always shown resilience through past crises (citing Campanella and Vale 2020).

Kim Hart, "Coronavirus Derails Plans for Smart City Projects," Axios Cities, 14 May 2020

Since it seems the coronavirus will be with us for awhile, might tech help us manage and sustain the social restart? Maybe not, because projects will cost money cities don't have, and because anything that smacks of monitoring people raises red flags. Sidewalk Labs scrapped a project in Toronto (Hart cites Daly 2020), and survey respondents show a marked ambivalence toward contract tracing if it involves using cellphone data (Hart cites Ipsos 2020). Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff argues the pandemic will create more need for smart cities, and his company is looking at other projects where they could work with local investors to implement some of the features proposed in Toronto (Kiger 2020).

Adie Tomer and Lara Fishbane, "Coronavirus Has Shown Us a World Without Traffic. Can We Sustain It?" Brookings, 1 May 2020

National and local data show that use of motor vehicles dropped dramatically during the various shutdowns around the country. (In the Cedar Rapids area, driving dropped by more than 2/3 between March 1 and April 24, but by one measure has bounced back since then.) Traffic as well as air cleared, particularly in areas with (a) early shutdowns, (b) high concentrations of information and management workers, and (c) Democratic-leaning politics. We can't survive long with the economy shut down, of course, but can we make some changes to preserve some of the benefits of low traffic? They suggest flexible work schedules and more telecommuting, replacing the excise tax on gasoline with fees for vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and redesigning streets to promote cycling, walking, and public transportation (plugging the advocacy group Smart Growth America). (See also CBC Radio 2020, which includes an interview with urbanist Brent Toderian.)

But there will be pushback, notes Ben German ("Coronavirus is Reshaping Urban Mobility," Axios, 21 May 2020). There's already evidence that driving levels are bouncing back from April's troughs in a big way, as work resumes and people are anxious about the cleanliness of public transportation. "Many transportation planners are concerned that the combination of reduced capacity, as well as fears of using transit in a pandemic world, will result in a shift towards personal vehicles," said Regina Clewlow, CEO of Populus, which provides transportation data analytics to local governments. It's up for grabs (citing Zipper 2020). [My take: Cities like New York, London, and Paris, as well as tech-heavy cities in the western U.S., have strong reasons to keep cars at bay; in other places I expect the car to regain dominance.] 

Another alternative to public transportation is cycling. Electric bicycles are selling fast as another, but, again, while a few large cities are converting significant road space to cycling, they are the exceptions (Ricker and Hawkins 2020).

Starr Herr-Cardillo, "How Designers are Remaking Spaces for Our New Socially Distanced Lives," WHYY, 9 May 2020

Architects are looking at retrofitting buildings to make them "COVID-19-ready," including long-term issues with schools and offices as well as immediate work on emergency sites like hospitals and food banks. The goal is to make public spaces "more flexible and adaptable," including more modular features.

Trish Riggs, "Confronting COVID-19: Renewing the Focus on Resilience and the Future of Cities," UrbanLand, 4 May 2020

Highlights from an Urban Land Institute webinar, "Resilience in the New Normal," featuring an investment manager, a green energy consultant, and developer and author Jonathan Rose. Toward the end of the event, Rose suggested that residences and workplaces would be relatively easy to adapt to public health and public confidence, but the stickler would be transportation: Ultimately, I could see this resulting in more use of autonomous vehicles--semiprivate or shared vehicles that come on demand and move along set courses. That would give people a sense of security and privacy with the efficiency of a mass transport system. Marc Wilsmann, the investment manager, predicted that "Once this is behind us," people will continue to value the advantages of dense urban areas. Panelists also discussed the likelihood of greater attention to air quality in buildings, spreading out workers within office by time as well as space, and--possibly counter-intuitively--continued efforts towards environmental sustainability. [Thanks to Grant Nordby for sending this article my way.]

 

AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times (Polity, 2017)

Written before the pandemic, but with additional resonance now, academic authors look at the challenges facing cities in Africa and Asia, focusing particularly on Kinshasa, Jakarta, and Cape Town. Their challenges are much the same as those facing Western cities, but with weaker institutions, greater extremes of wealth and poverty, and the likelihood of continued explosive population growth. Individuals, unofficial groups, and even governments are described as scrambling and improvising for whatever goods they can acquire in a shifting, dangerous environment. The authors decry top-down solutions, especially those imposed by outsiders ("capital"), and advocate inclusive policy making, multi-faceted solutions (i.e. don't focus on a single silo like housing) and "experimentation" in preference to "a clean slate." They eschew statistical data, perhaps understandably, but the prose is often difficult, particularly for an audience of practitioners. More narrative might have helped accessibility; having read Trevor Noah's Born a Crime (Spiegel and Grau, 2016) helped me.

John Surico, "Need More Outdoor Public Space? Maybe Cities Already Have It," City Lab, 6 May 2020

Where do you go to get some air when every place you go is crowded? This is particularly a problem in bigger cities. The writer suggests most of those cities have golf courses, cemeteries, parking lots, and school campuses that the public could be encouraged to use, and those that are already open could extend their hours later into the night. This seems like a short-term problem for the pandemic, but how short-term is the pandemic going to be? London's walking and cycling commissioner, Will Norman, is expecting multiples of current levels of both through the summer and maybe into the fall. Moreover, "We need to come out of this crisis in a radically different way." Can the public claim more open urban space, and keep it?

Other places might follow Miami's lead in turning golf courses into housing, or that of a Washington, D.C. area developer who has been making townhouses out of retail space (Bivins 2020).

Lloyd Alter, "Rethinking Public Washrooms After the Coronavirus," TreeHugger, 4 May 2020

Pictures of successful urbanism feature crowded outdoor cafes and places to walk dogs, but sooner or later one confronts the banal need to urinate or defecate, and where are the pictures of that? When I spent a sabbatical semester writing downtown a few years ago, I (eventually) found a total of three restrooms that weren't locked. What happens, Alter wonders, when some restroom owners go out of business, and others weary of the task of keeping their cleanliness at pandemic standards. He advocates a national program of self-cleaning restrooms: Montreal's self-cleaning public toilets cost a quarter of a million dollars each (citing CBC News 2018). On the other hand, cities are building highways that cost billions; there is always money for that. 

Can parking lots in the city be converted to more recreational uses?