Photo: Peter Laurence, The Lake, Central Park, 2019
by Peter Laurence
One shouldn’t make too much of most headlines, but “Can City Life Survive Coronavirus?,” the headline attached to an opinion piece by architecture critic Michael Kimmelman (NYT, Mar. 17, 2020), must give us pause. While hyperbolic (certainly people will survive and therefore cities and city life will also survive this virus), we know that 7.7 billion people are vulnerable to the COVID-19 pathogen and reports indicate that a vaccine is twelve months to a year-and-a-half away. This means that social distancing, a neologism that needs no quotation marks, may be a “new normal”—that phrase another neologism that perhaps deserves them because we don’t know what unfathomable “normal” may define our lives only a few months from now.
As Kimmelman observes, this pandemic, which forces people apart, is not like a natural or man-made disaster that can draw us together. He cites the case of the 1995 Chicago heat wave (from which Jane Jacobs drew other conclusions in Dark Age Ahead), where elderly people who were able to rely on neighborhood public life and spaces survived while those who lived in a neighborhood without public space and social support died. This isn’t like that. Nor is it like those hopeful episodes, from San Francisco, Mexico City, New York, or New Orleans, described by Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. This situation is more like the smallpox epidemics of the early eighteenth century, when wealthy colonists settled in rural Greenwich Village to escape the city. In recent weeks, photos circulating on social media of Greenwich Village blocks with an abundance of parking spaces have been captioned with suggestions that well-to-do New Yorkers, following the ancient migratory pattern of the privileged, have again evacuated to country homes outside of the city. (For more on related NYC history, James Nevius’ “New York’s built environment was shaped by pandemics,” is a good historical summary, although missing related stories of tuberculosis and “lung blocks.” More significantly, despite the tagline to Nevius’s essay “we have been here before,” his expansive history only highlights the fact that maybe we haven’t.)
So, while we hold in our hearts the suffering of many now and to come—and recognize that this is more a time to ask how we might help others than for glib punditry and armchair expertise—it is fair to wonder how social life and public space—urban, suburban, and rural—may be necessarily transformed in the coming months and years, and in what ways those changes may become permanent. (And we need to remember, at the same time, that, according to the lifesaving World Health Organization, some billions of people already lack clean water and basic hygiene facilities and were already vulnerable to more commonplace diseases.)
Perhaps foremost, will we see a return to ideas about decentralization and de-densification promoted most notably by Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the last century—when industrialization and immigration defined cities like London, Chicago, and New York, and created genuinely harmful overcrowding and attendant epidemics? Will we see planners and politicians promote suburban and rural life, as they did during the Cold War, when people feared nuclear war and the bombing of American cities?
No doubt we will see this, and we may see people traumatized from this experience retreat from city life. We have already seen a call to reduce “our dependence on megacities” (as if megacities were planned) and density described as the “enemy.” But we have yet to see how rural and suburban communities, although perhaps later in the pandemic timeline due to their relative remoteness, will fare in the weeks to come. Unlike suburban parking lots over-designed for Christmas shopping, rural and smaller regional hospitals are no better designed for community-scaled crises in mind; they too lack facilities for a pandemic and will likely be overwhelmed. City hospitals, like cities themselves, are the natural place for the concentration of knowledge and specialists. Thus, it is difficult to imagine that decentralization will work now, even for present reasons, any more than it did when Howard conceived of his so-called “Garden Cities,” which were unable to be self-sufficient or create jobs, as he had hoped. As much as it was the case in the mid twentieth century, when Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Americans are not good at regional planning—which was part of the reason she wrote her great book in the first place.
COVID-19, a microscopic non-living thing, may change the world, in many ways. Despite what we may hear, however, cities are not to blame for this disease, though they, like us, may be temporarily among its victims.
We need to change our habits. We need to demand more from politicians posing as public servants, including a reversal of the disrespect for science that Jane warned us of in Dark Age Ahead—even take to the streets, as Jane Jacobs did when necessary. We need to invest much more in local community infrastructure, mindful of their life-sustaining natural and social ecologies, whether the neighborhoods are urban, suburban, or rural. (We saw, very quickly, how important and valued public spaces, both streets designed for people and parks, have been to people during this crisis.) We need to support and invest far more greatly in processes of maintenance and restoration, and those people who—as we can now see more clearly than ever—maintain our health and well-being, our institutions and our communities. And, in the meantime, we may face an unprecedented global financial crisis.
Ultimately, however, our solutions will come from our productive, import-replacing, life-affirming cities. Because they are our concentrated storehouses of expertise, innovation, intelligence, and creativity, Jane’s words remain true: “Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”
In the days and weeks to come, The Center for the Living City—whose name now reinforces our determination to see humane and revitalized cities—will gather and share thoughts from our board members, friends, and admired thinkers and activists. We would also like to hear from you. We want to use this time to gather and share what you see and, whenever and wherever possible, creatively respond to the complex problems in front of us.