Post-pandemic cities: The great reset – Architecture AU

Cities are the physical manifestation of the human species. As artefacts they represent the myriad of social, economic and political relationships in built form. In fact, with over 55 percent of the global population living in cities for the first time,¹ they have become the defining characteristic of the twenty-first century. Cities continue to attract people with opportunities created through the benefits of agglomeration and the United Nations predicts that they will be home to 68 percent of the global population by 2050, creating the greatest mass urbanization in the history of humankind.²

In 2020, however, cities experienced a population “flight,” with New York reported to have lost 420,000 people, or approximately 5 percent of its population, as a result of COVID-19.³ The spread of the disease, aided by physical proximity, has created a flight to suburban and exurban retreats.⁴ This exodus is akin to the post-World War II “white flight” to suburbia facilitated by the new-found freedom of car travel,⁵ which ultimately led to the “hollowing out” and blight of inner-urban areas in the later part of the twentieth century.

Will COVID-19 lead to similar macro changes to the city form? In the public domain there have been many positive temporary changes to the city. The New Urban Mobility Alliance has recorded 560 initiatives in 245 cities globally in response to COVID-19.⁶ For example, local governments have created cycle lanes literally overnight to support the increase in bike commuting brought on by avoidance of public transport. Canberra introduced e-scooters in August 2020, with a rapid uptake in popularity. Car parking spaces are being replaced by outdoor dining settings to facilitate physical distancing measures as we begin to socialize again. Streets are being closed temporarily to create outdoor play spaces in support of public health initiatives. These changes are largely an acceleration of existing trends toward a post-automobile age⁷ where new priorities shift toward low-carbon forms of transport, pedestrianization and the creation of public spaces. Clearly, some have been an opportunistic implementation during a period of limited public scrutiny. Perhaps they point to a future direction for cities after the pandemic? Having seen the benefits, let’s hope that the public will support their retention as permanent modifications to our city’s public realm.

Office and shops have been replaced by working from home and online shopping in response to government-enforced lockdowns. While the online version of these activities has boomed, 8 the social interaction they provide is critical and will ensure their recovery. Today, as many offices remain well below capacity, there are predictions of the wholesale repurposing of vacant commercial buildings. I believe that rather than downsizing, tenants will retrofit their existing workspaces for increased collaboration and socialization as well as potentially adding amenities to attract workers back to the office. Retail centres have also been hit hard, with many devoid of customers. In response, retailers are transitioning to smaller tenancies that focus on the brand experience rather than the act of purchasing. These pandemic-induced changes, however, reinforce existing trends in both sectors rather than predict their wholesale demise.

Meanwhile, cities have become eerie ghost towns. Poetic images of deserted streets in global cities from New York to Sydney present a post-apocalyptic vison of the death of the city. I am reminded of the dystopian vision in Terry Gilliam’s film 12 Monkeys (1995), in which New York has been abandoned by humankind and is inhabited by roaming wild animals. Of course, empty streets are a reflection of the vacated office buildings, hotels, shops, restaurants and public transport. While office landlords have been vigorously calling for a return to work,⁹ sometimes counter to the advice of government health officials, futurologists have been quick to predict the demise of the city. These early and often sensationalist predictions create attention-grabbing headlines such as “From peak city to ghost town,”¹⁰ “New York City is dead forever”¹¹ and “Is this the end of the line for public transport?”¹² These are similar to the sensationalist predictions like “The end of tall buildings”¹³ in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, in which the authors wrote, “We are convinced that the age of skyscrapers is at an end. It must now be considered an experimental building typology that has failed.”

So, will the pandemic end the 200-year trajectory of the growth of cities? Historically, we have seen cities, or parts thereof, abandoned before, yet each time this has created new opportunities and led to a reinvigoration of city life. The current “death” of the city needs to be considered in a historic context before we can contemplate the legacy effects of the pandemic.

In the nineteenth century, the stench of animal manure in the streets and smoke from industrial factories and fireplaces caused the wealthy to flee the city, leaving it to the working class. This in turn brought about the birth of modern town planning movements that promoted de-densification of the city, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement to Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (Radiant City). Howard’s book To-morrow: A peaceful path to real reform (1898) promoted the harmonious integration of town and country, with his formative diagram entitled “Group of slumless, smokeless cities.”

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English urban planner Ebenezer Howard promoted a series of garden cities around a large central city in an attempt to de-densify nineteenth-century cities.

Image: From Ebenezer Howard’s 1898 book, To-morrow: A peaceful path to real reform (originally published by Swann Sonnenschein).

Late-nineteenth-century public works improved the sanitation and hygiene of cities, including the provision of fresh water and sewerage systems, while also leaving a legacy of great public works such as Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s boulevards and parks in Paris, Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York and Joseph Bazalgette’s embankments in London, all of which greatly improved the attractiveness of city living and reversed the flight to the country.

In the twentieth century, the abandonment of inner-city manufacturing buildings in New York’s Soho led to the threat of urban renewal while creating the opportunity for artists to inhabit rundown cast-iron warehouses. Jane Jacobs fought off a proposal for a 10-lane freeway through Soho, advocating instead for the organic regeneration of cities in her influential book The death and life of great American cities (1961). Developers ultimately retrofitted these warehouses into apartments, creating one of New York’s most desirable neighbourhoods.

More recently, globalization and the advent of the shipping container caused the “death” of dockland areas in many waterfront cities around the world. These derelict and decaying places created opportunities for urban regeneration, allowing post-industrial cities to rediscover their waterfronts. Today they boast compact, mixed-use neighbourhoods with a combination of retrofitted warehouses and new buildings, from HafenCity in Hamburg to Battery Park City in New York and Canary Wharf in London. Examples closer to home are Melbourne’s Docklands and Sydney’s Barangaroo and Walsh Bay Wharves.

Whether it involves new buildings or retrofitting existing structures, private property owners are ever ready to adapt to new directions in the development of the city. But what is the future of cities after the pandemic? Will they recover and thrive or will the pandemic leave lasting fears of social interaction leading to long-term decline? For me, the question is not whether our cities will recover, but rather in what form.

Governments have taken on unprecedented debt to fuel the recovery, but how is it best spent and what will its impact be on the future city? Focusing expenditure on large-scale urban infrastructure creates massive employment today while building the city for future generations. I believe that now is not the time for short-term thinking, but rather for investment in public works that will create a better future for our cities. As Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste!”

In order to maximize public benefit, we should consider what type of future society we want to build for. The pandemic has made us reconsider our priorities. The World Economic Forum has called for a “great reset”¹⁴ to achieve a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable world. Cities, in turn, are focusing on more humane environments designed around the diverse needs of people and their wellbeing. In the twenty-first century, we need to create more equitable cities, with social infrastructure delivering affordable housing, schools and hospitals. We need greener cities with more parks and open space. We need more pedestrian-friendly cities, with public space and squares for people. Transport infrastructure should be conceived to shift our mono-centric, car-based cities into a poly-centric model of walkable, high-density clusters supported by localized, low-carbon networks of cycle and walking paths. Finally, of course, we need more sustainable cities, powered by renewables with battery storage rather than fossil fuels.

These are the types of public and social infrastructure that will create more humane and liveable cities. With the pressure of economic recovery on governments, however, it will take an act of great citizenship to invest in the city for future generations. At times like these we would do well to recall the words of nineteenth-century architecture and social critic John Ruskin: “The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city’s greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.”

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