During COVID-19 times, it can feel like a year has gone by in between writing these newsletters.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, 'reopening' has been rocky. Cases continue to skyrocket where top-down messaging has been scattered (e.g.Brazil;Russia). Cases continue to steadily climb in areas that either were less restrictive early on, or eased restrictions too soon (e.g. in certain US states;India). Cases continue to keep randomly spiking in areas that were hyper-intense at the onset (e.g.Korea,Singapore). Cases continue to drop in areas that have eased restrictions more recently (e.g.most of Europe). And then there'sNew Zealand.
Needless to say, finding a rhyme and rhythm to the pandemic is nearly impossible. (Look no further thanFlorida.) And this sort of strange endless fog that we've all found ourselves in — to totally different degrees — looks like it'll be the daily weather forecast for a summer/winter (depending on your hemisphere) unlike any we've ever experienced before. In short: this is unpredictable!
So what does that mean for cities? (Which, I'm sure, is why you're here reading this.) In this installment, I'm going to pose another five questions — I confronted the same five the last two newsletters — that the pandemic raises for urban areas, spliced with readings, writings and other ramblings that may help.
Let's start with...
1. Who is all this space really for?
We're in the middle of a space race.
Municipalities everywhere — both small and large — are desperately trying to figure out how society stays six feet (2 metres) apart for the foreseeable future. (Even in my hometown of suburban Nassau County.) I wrote a piece for CityLab in early May that recommended a few potential tools for cities to quickly create more open space. On radio appearances, I grouped the interventions we're seeing into three broad categories:transport(e.g. pop-up cycle lanes);recreation(e.g. "Slow Streets"); and economic(outdoor restaurant patios). And if you've followed my Twitter at all, you might've seen that this has consumed my thoughts lately. (I'm also tracking case studies for aEU research project, so that doesn't help.)
But with what's going on in the news, it's hard to take this moment that has excited urban planners and thinkers seriously — and, frankly, even offensive to. Lansing, Minneapolis and Hong Kong cruelly remind us that public space is this stage where all sorts of perceptions and inequities — e.g. racial; socioeconomic; political — play out. Minneapolis won't suddenly heal its POC community's gaping wounds with the police department because a few "Open Streets" were put in. No matter how much the word "opportunity" gets thrown around on urbanist, white-dominant Zoom webinars, we can't disregard what offline public space actually really is, and can be, for people. (H/t toAlissa Walker and Brentin Mock, who have both written powerfully on the matter.)
Straight up: the space in our cities isn't safe for everyone. And I think we're seeing that imbalance play out in two specific ways:
Space doesn't mean the same thing to each person. When Christian Cooper, an avid bird watcher, started filming Amy Cooper, a dog walker, when she was caught breaking the rules against dogs in the Central Park Ramble (a forested sanctuary open to the public), these two interacted with public space in completely different ways, leading to divergent actions. Christian found solace in said space, as it long acted as a refuge both before and during the pandemic. Amy called the police when she saw Christian filming her, telling them that an 'African-American man' was 'threatening' her in said space. The key difference between both Coopers: Christian is black; Amy is white.
Not all modes are being considered. I spilled a lot of ink talking about the parking lot raves in Germany, and the drive-in movie theatre at the airport in Lithuania. But if you look at the photos, it's all cars. So this "streetspace innovation" isn't really innovative or accessible to entire demographics of car-less people, predominantly folks who are poor or from communities of color. Take, for example, this new drive-in theater at Yankee Stadium. It's located in an area with one of the highest rates of air pollution in the country (I'll get to that later), and one of the lowest rates of car ownership in the city. So who exactly is that for?
These realities do not suddenly disappear now that we have a few renderings of people of all backgrounds having this nice kumbaya moment out on the street together. And we mustn't forget that.
2. What about air quality?
A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists are still unsure of the relationship between poor air quality and infection rates. Here's what we do know:
- The cities that have gotten hit hard (Milan, London, New York, São Paulo, etc.) were notorious for poor air quality before this.
- Small increases in fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) corresponds with substantial increases in COVID-19-related deaths.
- Asthma is still not a top risk factor in known infections or death.
- Populations that are most exposed or vulnerable to poor air quality (POC; aging; low-income) are dying at greater rates.
But then these two pictures should look different:
The first (credit: The New York Times) is a breakdown of the COVID-19 cases in New York City by zip code. The second (credit: Columbia University) is the PM 2.5 rates in New York in 2014. If air quality was a determinative factor, then the richest areas of Manhattan should be overloaded with cases; instead, it's the borough with the least number of cases per capita.
So how did that happen? Perhaps because a significant portion of Manhattanites have actually left.
In climate change adaptability studies — which are increasingly applicable to COVID-19 — risk is often thought of as the result of two factors: the hazard itself; and one's vulnerability to said hazard. In this case, we know the hazard: COVID-19. But the vulnerability of these Manhattanites — who may be breathing in worse air, sure, but more likely have the resources (read: money) to telework, or skip town once shit hits the fan — isn't the same as, say, someone in the South Bronx. Then you have devastated areas like Far Rockaway, where air pollution isn't as bad (it's the shaded-green peninsula on the bottom right), but it still suffers from a number of other factors (e.g. poverty, public health).
So rather than a tell-all, air quality appears to compound, not conclude. Yet the stark divide over the air we breathe that has been exposed by coronavirus seems like it should corral a much more diverse coalition of actors calling for change together. Even if pollution is just one piece of the puzzle.
3. How does tourism return to cities?
It helps with hyper-gentrification. It promotes a criminally insane amount of air travel. And it can be incredibly damaging to the local environment. But one indisputable fact about mass tourism, whether we like it or not: millions of urban denizens rely on it to live.
Hence why many countries are falling over themselves to assure visitors that they are open for business. Should the pandemic freeze tourism for over a year, this could wreck serious economic havoc on areas that have become overly reliant on it. And that's a real problem. (No matter how great the photos of sites without selfie sticks look.)
So what are cities doing? We're starting to see the first signs of a new formula: reassure people that heavily frequented areas won't feel so... well, heavily frequented. Athens is looking to pedestrianize the streets around the Acropolis and other archaeological sites. London Bridge could soon be closed to cars and trucks. And Venetians, after having their alleys and streets quiet for a few weeks, are now calling for "intelligent tourism" measures, like allowing less cruise ships and huge tour groups.
Mass tourism had always been defined by maximalism: the most amount of people, packed into the most amount of spaces, with little restraint or care for the local impact. COVID-19 could change that, by design. And maybe that'll give cities a chance to rethink their unhealthy dependency on tourism, and push the industry to be more sustainable/less awful than before.
4. Is our trash changing?
Where were we with waste before the pandemic?
Countries all over the world were adopting single-use plastic bans on bags and straws. It seemed like composting was moving from niche activity to the municipal-level mainstream. And food waste, a great cost of our insatiable appetite, was a rallying cry being taken up by chefs and celebrities alike. Progress, albeit slowly, was being made on reducing our massive methane creation.
Jason (the Trash Man) Bergman suggested that I look into the rapidly changing forces behind trash during the pandemic for this newsletter. So here's the straightaway: the pandemic has reversed all of those trends.
Most places that had single-use bans have temporarily suspended them, as the plastic bag became a symbol of sterility. A glut of unused global supply has seen restaurants dumping food, Uber chopping up their JUMP bikes, and farmers killing pigs at will. Reusable cups or cutlery may be off-limits for some time. With city budgets in crisis mode, composting programs may have to take a back seat for some time until funds recover. And this massive amount of PPE being used? It's largely not recyclable.
So where does that leave us now? In a big heap of mess.
During the pandemic, trash has been a better indicator of the risk vulnerability I discussed before than what we're consciously choosing not to throw way. What waste advocates have to worry about now is habit formation. It's classic behavior theory (something I've been studying a lot lately): perceptions inform attitudes, which then create preferences, which form habits over time.
A mega-event that has left us more germaphobic than ever is deeply affecting those baseline perceptions. How that tracks up the ladder of our attitudes, preferences and habits (and, as a result, policy proposal approval ratings) will determine how much trash we're willing to create — or tolerate — these next few years.
5. What is happening to the gig economy?
Before the pandemic, the 'future of work' was trending freelance at all ends of the income spectrum.
At the top, you had corporations outsourcing work to remote contract workers (largely to cut costs). In the middle, the worker themselves were becoming mainstays in industries like media, tech and advertising (also largely to cut costs). And at the bottom, you had once-informal jobs (taxis, couriers, etc.) being commodified by platform-based app companies, creating this dearth of underpaid 'gig' (read: freelance) workers. (Also largely to cut costs.)
The plight of the gig economy has always been personal for me, as someone who has navigated the freelance world for over seven years now (and has helped others try to do so as well). So since the pandemic hit, it has felt like the gig economy has been thrusted into the spotlight — and in ways we haven't yet figured out. That goes beyond just adopting work-from-home culture. (Freelancers always knew it was more productive.)
It has to do with mobility's role in our economies, a topic Prof. Biao Xiang and I discussed for a 'COVID-19 Flash Talk' at Oxford. Xiang calls it "mobility assemblage": right now, mobility (or movement) hasn't stopped; it's just being redistributed.
Mobility flows like water. Restaurants cannot serve customers at pre-pandemic levels, so are instead hiring delivery app drivers, who scour the streets for orders. Uber is laying off thousands because a lot less people are taking them, thus sending drivers onto different apps since no one else is hiring. The short- and long-term collapse of storefront retail (discussed in earlier newsletters) shakes the salaried establishment, and creates a wealth of newly free gig workers for online companies who rely on self-employed workers. The dry-up of advertising dollars and venture capital ignites layoffs at media outlets and tech start-ups, which means a whole lot of journalists and developers are now available for hire (perhaps permanently).
So the 'future of work' may be forcibly freelance. And this massive redistribution of how we move and work will have long-lasting spatial repercussions on how cities function. (Cue the death of the workplace piece.) That was already happening before the pandemic, evident in phenomena like Uber and Amazon's traffic congestion, WeWork's real estate empire, and the invasion of "third wave" coffeeshops on Main Streets.
But it's worth remembering that the gig economy cuts both ways. It undermines job security, but makes livelihoods less dependent on one company's quarterly profit. It means less consistent office space, but keeps workers in their communities more. It bites at traditional labor unions, but creates different solidarity structures (e.g. co-operatives; non-profits) in the process.
It's a structure remarkably well-suited to this time: uncertain, destabilizing, and always in flux.
And finally, since it's been a while since I've concluded these newsletters with a proper image, here's one from a recent past in Medellín — combining two things badly injured by this pandemic: public transport and libraries.
Be safe. Be well. And please do what you can to help.
- JS
P.S. If you have thoughts on what cities look like after the pandemic, consider contributing to a project I'm working on with Oxford Urbanists!