A pause has been forced on urban life. Quiet roads, empty skies, deserted high streets and parks, closed cinemas, cafés and museums a break in the spending and work frenzy so familiar to us all. The reality of lockdown is making ghost towns of the places we once knew. Everything we know about our urban world has come to a shuddering halt. For now.
The lockdown will, at some point, end. Urban life will begin to hum again to the familiar rhythms of work, leisure and shopping. This will be a huge relief for us all. Yet our towns and cities will never be the same. Indeed, things might get worse before they get better.
But it’s also the case that other crises haven’t gone away. Our relatively brief lockdown won’t solve longer-term urban problems: dependence on fossil fuels, rising carbon emissions, poor air quality, dysfunctional housing markets, loss of biodiversity, divisions between the rich and the poor, low paid work. These are going to need our attention again.
The coronavirus crisis has offered a new perspective on these problems and the limits of the way we have run our urban world over the last few decades. Cities are key nodes in our complex and highly connected global society, facilitating the rapid flow of people, goods and money, the rise of corporate wealth and the privatisation of land, assets and basic services. This has brought gains for some through foreign travel, an abundance of consumer products, inward investment and steady economic growth.
But we are now seeing a flip side to this globalised urban world. A densely connected world can quickly turn a localised disease into a pandemic; large areas of the economy are run by large corporates who don’t always meet basic public needs; land and resources can lie empty for years; and low paid workers in the informal or gig economy can be left exposed with little protection.
This model has the perfect conditions for creating a crisis like coronavirus. It’s also really bad at dealing with it. So something else is required to guide us into the future. The old story in which cities compete against one another to improve their place in the global pecking order was never great at meeting everyone’s needs. But now it’s looking very risky, given the need for increased cooperation and local resilience.
Now, the lockdown has thrown us all into a real-time laboratory full of living examples of what a more sustainable future might look like. We have a perfect opportunity to study and explore which of these could be locked in to build sustainable, and safer, cities.
No particular urban future is inevitable. The future story, and reality, of our towns and cities is up for grabs. The positives that are glimpsed during this crisis could feasibly be locked in and scaled up to create a fairer, greener, safer urban future. We can all live well, and even flourish, in cities even if we have and do a little bit less of the things we have become used to. Revaluing what’s important community, friendship, family life allows us to see how much we already have that can improve our wellbeing.
How city governance responds in this crisis and afterwards will be key. There will certainly be a much bigger role for the state, and this might be more authoritarian as recent emergency powers over border controls, surveillance and enforced quarantines attest.
But there is a way of countering these tendencies by creating an enabling, responsive, participatory state where solutions are reached with citizens, rather than imposed on them. A meaningful state-civil society contract means the state can act powerfully but also take the side of citizens, through, for example shifting assets, resources, taxes and welfare in their favour.
20102020, The Conversation Media Group Ltd