Coronavirus will leave the world a very different place. Some of our institutions may never recover. Among the most vulnerable? The world’s biggest cities.
Coronavirus, unlike a terrorist attack, doesn’t destroy the physical fabric of cities. There’s no fire, no smoke. Instead, what’s torn to pieces is our willingness to be around other people.
Other people are now seen as suspicious — a potential source of viral infection. We all know the awkward dance one does to put more space between ourselves and an oncoming pedestrian. Crowds, meanwhile, are now utterly terrifying. And you can’t exactly have a city without crowds.
A city is a place of encounters, that’s why they exist. If encounters are uncomfortable, cities are at risk.
In Australia, where the virus has hit us relatively gently, we can expect cities to change at least a little. Office towers will suffer as we learn to work from home. Malls will empty out as retailers go under and online shopping grows more prevalent still. Crowds will be thinned out for a time.
In Europe and the United States, cities will be affected far more gravely. In London, an estimated 7% of the population has been infected already, and in New York, 21%. Everyone knows of someone who has died. That makes the fear terribly real — fear which will not abate, even when the virus itself does.
Just as the generation that lived through the Great Depression has their behavioural quirks, so the generation that lived though COVID-19 will carry the scars of this period forever. No New Yorker is going to head back into a crowd without surfacing their memories of this period. Avoidance behaviour will be the new normal.
Experts are calling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) “the second tsunami of the SARS-Cov2 pandemic.” It is most likely to hit health care workers and the infected. In cities with high infection rates, that’s millions of people.
Even those who don’t have PTSD will have a nagging feeling about crowds. They’ll suppress it with conscious thought — “remember, this is no more dangerous than it ever was before”. But such thought takes effort, and that effort will subtly turn people off crowds, and city life will be eroded.
Fear of crowds will hit shopping centres, bars, nightclubs. But it will hit cities hardest where daily life is synonymous with public transport. The Tube is emblematic of London, and the subway is an icon in New York. Those cities, with their high infection rates, high death rates, and terrible surface traffic, face a particularly challenging future.
In April, the US National Bureau of Economic Research circulated a working paper from an MIT economist entitled “The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City“.
The MIT economist, Jeffrey Harris, found that “maps of subway station turnstile entries, superimposed upon zip-code-level maps of reported coronavirus incidence, are strongly consistent with subway-facilitated disease propagation”.
Even if he’s wrong — and he might well be — the link is plausible in people’s minds. How many people will feel at ease taking a crowded tube once this is over? In future they are likely to be avoided by those who are able, becoming the domain of those with no alternative.
Agglomeration
Cities are economically vital. Like any good fact, this is obvious now, but it took some excellent academic work to prove it. The concept of agglomeration economics explains why cities work — by providing more different types of opportunities in one connected location, it allows us to work in jobs that suit us best, shop at shops that suit us best, meet people that suit us best. The bigger the city, the better the opportunities to match ourselves to our preferences.
Agglomeration economics is why bigger cities are more productive. You double the size of the city, you can expect the firms in it to be about 5% more productive. And higher productivity, of course, leads to higher incomes. All that is placed at risk by the coronavirus.
And of course, cities like London and New York are not just economic hubs but cultural hubs — places which incubate fashion, publishing, film and TV. All that excitement and creativity is at risk.
But then again, cultural capital of the world is always moving. Once it was Athens. Once Vienna. Then Paris, London and now, most would agree, New York. Does it continue its westward drift? Could San Francisco (confirmed coronavirus deaths: 23) take the title? Or does the title skip over the Pacific? Might Shanghai (confirmed coronavirus deaths: 6) become the world’s new beating heart?
Or do we all move to the country, get online, and let the idea of the city as a crucible of energy and creativity slowly fade?
Maybe the New York and London ‘International’ celebs and elites who have apparently moved to those cities and outpriced property to the ordinary punters will bugger off and let regular people with ordinary riskier lives return. London has seen many worse catastrophies, most recently the 70’s IRA random bombing campaign, long term it hasn’t change things that much.
Grenfell.
I’d be a little wary of passing any kultchural capital titles to somewhere like San Francisco.
theatlanticdotcom/health/archive/2019/03/typhus-tuberculosis-medieval-diseases-spreading-homeless/584380/
“Medieval Diseases Are Infecting California’s Homeless
Typhus, tuberculosis, and other illnesses are spreading quickly through camps and shelters.
….diarrheal disease shigellosis, as well as Bartonella quintana, or trench fever…….Hepatitis A…
“Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public-health crisis,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said …..“Typhus,” he said. “A medieval disease. In California. In 2019.”………..
The diseases have flared as the nation’s homeless population has grown in the past two years: About 553,000 people were homeless at the end of 2018, and nearly one-quarter of homeless people live in California………….
Public-health officials and politicians are using terms like disaster and public-health crisis to describe the outbreaks, and they are warning that these diseases can easily jump beyond the homeless population….”
The reason it won’t be San Francisco is that housing in the Bay Area is way too expensive for anyone (except highly paid tech workers) to live in! The diseases on the streets David mentions are symptoms of deep-seated inequalities in the state of California, and the specific exclusionary housing codes which have made that city (and much of LA too) a Nimby’s paradise. And at the same time laid waste to a once great metropolis…
All too true, Mr Ed.
Although, the tech heads in Silicon Valley are getting increasingly nervous, as a growing number of those homeless are ‘encroaching’ on the Nimby’s geographic paradise.
Cities smaller than NY and London still provide agglomeration. Beyond a certain level the cons start to outweigh the pros. Energy tips over into neurosis. Fewer giants, more cities around 2-3 million. Better socially, ecologically and health-wise – better for infrastructure, better for productivity over-all.
Yes, I wonder if this could result in a more even distribution of population across numerous smaller cities, which provide the urban benefits of employment opportunities, cultural activities, etc, but still allow a bit more personal space for everybody.
If one checks the cities of Euroland, apart from the capitals, there are very few of 1-2M.
Dozens upon dozens in Germany & France of a couple of hundred thousand, not many over half a million by comparison.
Megacities are an abomination in economic, energy, equity, social & health terms.
Like all organisations, once beyond a certain optimum size, more & more of the resources – human & materiel – go to maintain the structure rather than the purpose.
There has been a knee-jerk rejection of density in general as a result of Covid-19, and the Nimby-ish anti-urban brigade are already exploiting it to the hilt. Expect lots more articles and letters to the editors (especially in The Age and Herald) arguing against infill housing projects, tall buildings of any description, any development at all… except of course sprawling, socially alienating fossil-fuel dependant suburbs on the far outskirts, out of sight and out of mind or the readers of those said papers!
Urban density in itself is not an issue in the spread of Covid-19. Why have Taipei, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, even Singapore (until those shamefully overcrowded dormitories of poorly paid migrant workers let them down) done so well compared to New York and London?
I am deeply saddened by the fate of NY and London (two of my favourite cities), but there are many social, cultural and political factors in the spread of this disease and its fatality rate. Never let it ever be used as an argument against city life.
Trust an economist to go straight to the nub of an issue and get it wrong.
An old German saying, “the air of a city makes men free” arose with the Hanseatic League.
It meant that in cities one was free of the feudal lords & serfdom but that is a problem with social mores & structure, not any intrinsic value of overcrowded, unsanitary agglomerations.
(Hint – crossbows were cheap, required no skill to use and were ideal for cramped streets where mounted knights, long bow archers and pike wielding armies were sitting ducks.)
This country is almost unique in having 2 megacities which with their ‘burbs are almost half the national population.
Add the east coast and small villages like Brisvegas, Sandcity & Churchtown and it approaches 90%.
This occurred because they were the entrepôts, originally for grain, wool followed by meat (esp with the erly advent of refrigerated shipping) then just “grewed like Topsy”.
They are oversubsidised up the wazoo because that’s where the votes are.
Decentralisation could easily be achieved – were this not such a tiny (minded) country – not by subsidies to move out to the regions (where 4/5 b/r houses on acres cost a fraction of a city rabbit hutch) which would be rorted but by charging the denizens of the coastal Great Wens the true cost of their pampered lifestyles – the water piped from catchments & dams hundreds of kilometres away, the lazy easy disposal of sewage into the sea and little things like the food & energy supply chains.
Hear Hear! This article made me ill with its indiscriminate praise of megacities though I notice Mexico City was missed off the list! Absolutely start costing in all the externalities the environment is currently taking a hit for and then see how attractive it is to live in a ridiculously overpriced 2 by 4 shit box. Sydney is a beautiful setting but everytime I stay there all I hear is ambulance sirens and the trains smell like piss!