Let's Not Forget What We Build Cities For
Suzhou, China. Via Wikimedia Commons.
There's a paradox rarely considered, at least in normal times, by those experiencing the delight and wonder that the world's cities have to offer: the serene oasis of a Shinto shrine nestled in a Tokyo back alley, boats plying the canals of Suzhou, the buzzing honeycomb of Marrakesh's medina, or jazz melodies wafting from a French Quarter courtyard. The habitat our ancestors crafted for themselves over generations was not only adapted to their practical and psychological needs in all sorts of ways that we modern humans are just beginning to relearn. The art of city-building also produced places of sublime beauty, harmony, and grace.
And yet here is the paradox: it is also true that, for the vast majority of human history, cities have been relatively miserable places to live. They've often been dirty, smelly, chaotic, and unsanitary, despite our best efforts to make them otherwise.
We're now in the latest engagement in a million-year war between humans and harmful microbes. We're equipped in this fight with a high-tech arsenal that even our grandparents could scarcely have imagined. And an infrastructure that our great-great grandparents, at the least, would have found miraculous: in much of the world, access to modern sewer systems, soap and clean water on demand, and adequately ventilated buildings are nearly universal.
Humans who had none of these advantages have been inhabiting cities for thousands of years, despite the obvious downsides of disease and pollution. It's going to be important in the coming times to reflect and remember why.
No, this crisis hasn't rendered urbanism obsolete. Neither did the last one and neither will the next one.
“I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.”
-Thomas Jefferson
People are generally bad at holding two contradictory or dissonant ideas in mind at the same time. The overwhelming advantages of rubbing shoulders with each other, and the occasional deadly risk of doing so, are two such ideas.
This helps explain why a tendency with deep roots in American culture (see Jefferson’s quote above) bubbles up at times of crisis: the notion that we would all be safer and better off if we dispersed to live more apart from each other. America’s earliest efforts at suburbanization were fueled by (and the modern urban planning profession arose fairly directly from) the sanitary reform movement of the late 19th century, a response to overcrowding and poor sanitation in industrializing cities. Many of the first zoning ordinances were written to ensure access to fresh air and sunlight. The conditions in which immigrants in Lower East Side tenements lived at the time are unimaginable in wealthy countries today, and—it's important to understand—have nothing in common with a modern "high density" skyscraper.
At the height of the Cold War, facing the specter of nuclear attack, some U.S. planners argued very seriously for dispersal of the populations of large cities into newly-built suburbs, to be connected by new networks of criss-crossing freeways. While I don't subscribe to the idea that this was a main driving force behind suburbanization (there were several), the belief that compact, walkable cities were too great a security risk to be allowed to continue was certainly one you could espouse in serious intellectual circles.
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, I'm seeing similar thoughts bubble up again. One Strong Towns reader wrote to us to ask the following question:
I want the discussion to take an entirely different turn. A Washington Post reporter points out that our experience with coronavirus may vary from that of many other countries because we are already "socially distanced" from each other in our single-family homes, giant-aisled superstores, etc. In many ways this is the car-friendly, pedestrian-hostile scenario that Strong Towns finds makes "weak towns." Is it possible that one of the setbacks of the pandemic will in fact be our own movement? The very activities that make our communities "weak" in financial terms may make them "strong" in terms of slowing down a pandemic.
I have two answers to this: a simpler one rooted in the epidemiology of this disease, and another based upon a more general observation of what cities do for us.
My simple answer is no. This writer's suggestion, to me, is easily dispelled by a look at the countries that appear to have best kept the outbreak in check: South Korea. Taiwan. Singapore. All three are known for extreme urban density and high-rise living. Meanwhile, the US, with its auto-oriented suburbia, and Italy, with its narrow streets and piazzas and legendary strolling culture, so far appear to be on very similar exponential trajectories:
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There simply isn't much reason to think that density is going to be a determining factor in the course of this epidemic. This particular virus spreads through droplets which contagious individuals may pass to each other but also leave behind on surfaces. It's not believed to be generally airborne. The key to its spread is direct human interaction.
It’s not clear, therefore, that suburban dwellers really have a leg up on social distancing. Consider the crowds and long lines encountered at Walmart and Costco stores this week. Suburbanites go to coffee shops and gyms too. They go to music festivals and political rallies. They go to school and work. When they buy food and medicine, someone has to staff the grocery stores and pharmacies. Someone has to manufacture and deliver those products. Nursing homes and hospitals need caregivers.
And there are ways in which spread-out living arrangements might even speed contagion, because our lives are less local than ever, for both better and worse. In the traditional city, a larger percentage of your interactions might take place close to home, resulting in geographic clusters of disease that can be tracked and contained. But we've normalized long-distance travel in modern America, not just for tourism but for everyday purposes. When you work 30 miles from where you live—and your coworkers in turn live all over a large metropolitan region, attend different places of worship and send their kids to different schools—tracing and containing transmission chains becomes almost impossible very quickly.
When the only thing worse than being together is being alone.
Beyond epidemiological questions, there's a more basic need to remember why human beings live in community, even knowing that we could one day become the greatest threat to one another—as we have many times throughout history.
What this crisis will actually do, and especially if it is a prolonged one, is expose the fiction that any of us is an island.
Staying healthy is one challenge. Social support is another. Cities foster the ability of neighbors to look out for one another, to deliver food and supplies to those in need, to coordinate child care so that parents can continue to work, to arrange makeshift shelter for the homeless, to get medical response teams to where they are needed quickly.
“What this crisis will actually do, and especially if it is a prolonged one, is expose the fiction that any of us is an island.”
The longer game will also favor cities that are financially resilient, and this means a development pattern that is intrinsically productive and not over-reliant on fragile outside institutions to function. The current stock market sell-off is probably a long overdue correction, but we are also likely to experience a very real, and painful, economic contraction. The ability of cities to depend on state and federal resources may be constrained. We will still need to provide the services we rely on each other for. And places built in ways that we know generate lasting wealth are at a huge advantage over those that are not.
Finally, though, there's something more intangible we shouldn't let go of, and it hearkens back to the contradiction we began with: how can the sheer delight of human cities coexist with the misery that has many times haunted them?
The city is a marvel, a creation as uniquely human as the ant hill or beaver dam is to their respective architects. Its most marvelous trait is the way that cities concentrate and amplify human ingenuity and initiative and compassion, and allow us to do greater things together than we could alone.
They cultivate in us, too, a sense of shared destiny, of belonging to something greater than ourselves. Witness the stories of citizens of Siena, Italy, singing together from their balconies during quarantine: not just any song, but a patriotic anthem about Siena itself.
We don’t build cities for today, next year, or this decade. We build to leave something much greater behind us when we go.
Bergamo. Image: Flickr via David Spender
If aliens were to land and ask for a tour of the best of what the human race has produced, you could do worse than to show them the streets of Barcelona on an ordinary Friday night. Or, in any other week of any other year—not this year—you might show them the walled Cittá Alta of Bergamo, perched at the exact nexus where the Alps abruptly give way to the plains of Lombardy. It's a remarkable creation. You don't have to have been there to look and know that deep wisdom breathes from those stones.
90 people died of COVID-19 in Bergamo in a single day last week. Many of their funerals have been conducted in the absence of family, attended only by a priest and a funeral home worker.
We should mourn this. We should commit ourselves to doing everything we need to do to prevent this outcome from befalling more families in more places. Take shelter at home and avoid all unnecessary social contact. Reach out, when your own situation is safe and stable, to find out who in your circles needs assistance that you can provide.
But when it comes to broader questions about how we ought to live, take a deep breath. That question is so much bigger than right now.
(Cover photo: Sunrise at Bergamo, Italy. Via Wikimedia Commons.)
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.