Pandemics Take Advantage of Everything Good in Cities. Here’s How we Protect Them.

In a sense, we’re lucky. Someday, we will surely be hit by a virus far more contagious and deadly than Covid-19. When that happens, it will be a good thing that everyone learned the term “social distancing” in March 2020.

Bill Gates warned us five years ago that “we’re not ready” for the next outbreak. Unfortunately, a TedTalk doesn’t quite focus the mind like being stuck at home for weeks while a virus rages, or watching all flights between the United States and Europe cancelled. When we get through this, governments must work to institutionalize every lesson learned from this catastrophe, because these lessons do not come cheap. We must be antifragile, becoming stronger through difficulty, rather than just surviving.

The coronavirus case map ends up being a fantastic illustration of America’s superstar, globally-connected citieshttps://t.co/LqAMlwxNC5@MarkMuro1 @jacob_whiton pic.twitter.com/rd7f4P58ee

— Rob Maxim (@robmaxim) March 12, 2020

These lessons are particularly important for cities, because the very things that make cities successful economically make them successful at spreading pathogens. Rob Maxim, at the Brookings Institute, points out that “coronavirus case map ends up being a fantastic illustration of America’s superstar, globally-connected cities.” Of course the virus can also spread between suburbs and smaller cities, but the urban centers with the strongest density of international connections are no doubt where it can spread fastest. What should we do about this?

Preparing the Social Off Button

Perversely, a pathogen seems to turn everything good in cities into a problem. We want international business and tourism travelers. We want streets, public spaces, festivals, theaters, bars, and restaurants full of people. We want packed public transit. We want tight, socially-connected communities, in which people see friends and family all the time. The things that make cities vibrant and prosperous all involve human connections, and that’s also precisely how the virus spreads.

So what is the solution? We could create bad streets and transit to discourage people from gathering. Many North American public spaces already look as empty on a normal day as Italian ones do during a pandemic, so perhaps this helps protect us. If we were really serious, we could abandon urban settlements and go back to hunting and gathering, because we had fewer pandemics before agriculture.

But no, we shouldn’t stop creating dense, vibrant, walkable communities, because these are the best environments for supporting our wellbeing, social bonds, and prosperity, and for fighting climate change. If pathogens love our human connections, that doesn’t mean we should stop loving them.

The lesson here is not that it’s bad to have strong human connections in cities, but rather, that we need to be able to shut them down quickly when we need to, like a turtle slipping back into its shell.

Every City Needs a Social Distancing Plan

Here is something I didn’t know a month ago: it is highly irresponsible for a well-connected, international city to lack a Social Distancing Plan. It’s a bit like having a dangerous, high-voltage machine that lacks an emergency off switch. Many parts of social distancing require state and federal action, so all levels of government should also have a plan.

In recent weeks, we have been learning what a social distancing plan should entail. Of course, experts will have much more to say on what works, and what doesn’t, once we have a chance to look back on Covid-19. But the following is an early tentative sketch of what such a plan should include: 

• Employees who can work from home should be officially identified in advance, so government, companies, and employees can better prepare, and quickly send people home when it is time. 

• Nonessential, high-risk businesses and government institutions should be categorized in advance, and prepared for temporary closure when necessary. Gyms, climbing gyms, bars, and libraries may fall into this category. 

• Government should audit how many households have a month’s worth of backup food and supplies. They should experiment with programs to push that number upwards, including subsidies for low-income families. 

• Government should encourage grocery stores to provide home delivery in all urban areas. Grocery companies may require subsidies to temporarily provide delivery to lower-density, low-income communities. 

• Schools, universities, and daycares need to work with students, parents, and instructors to develop their own plans to prepare for shutdowns.

• Government must build bike lanes between all urban neighborhoods, so that if taking transit becomes unadvisable, people who cannot drive have safe backup options.

Many of the above points cause considerable economic hardship, particularly for businesses that must shut down, and for people who cannot go to work. Governments must also therefore prepare a second set of measures to help ensure that the urban economy bends, but does not break.

“Density could actually help us cope with an outbreak…because it makes it far easier to provide services for people stuck at home.” Image Credit: Unsplash.

• Government should place a temporary moratorium on evictions. San Jose and San Francisco are already acting on this idea, so people stuck home from work don’t get stuck on the streets.

• If some tenants cannot pay rent, landlords also need protection. CityLab reports that San Francisco is considering two measures to help landlords, “one preventing foreclosures and another deferring utilities payments.” Italy has temporarily suspended mortgage payments, and their banks will “offer debt holidays to small firms and families.”

• Government should also place a temporary moratorium on cutting electricity, heat, water, internet, and phone service. 

• Government should provide financial support for hard-hit businesses to ensure they do not go bankrupt. 

No matter what we do, this Emergency-Social-Off-Button will cause economic disruption. However, if everyone comes out the other side with their homes, businesses, and jobs, the economy will retain its underlying structure, and our cities will quickly resume generating prosperity as before. If, instead, major employers go bankrupt and millions of people lose their homes, it will take years to recover, and some people never will. Our emergency off button must not break our economic machinery.

Density Creates Risks but also Solutions

Density helps create complex networks between people, which could help spread a disease. However, density could actually help us cope with an outbreak, once we press the social-off-button, because it makes it far easier to provide services for people stuck at home.

I am currently self-quarantined, because I flew internationally, and it helps a lot that I can order groceries online to my door. This is only possible because I live downtown. This service is not yet available for the inner suburbs of Halifax, and there are no current plans to provide it to the outer, lower-density suburbs. Density will be our friend if government needs to provide resources for the elderly, door-to-door testing, or at-home care for sick people.

The optimal urban form for surviving a pandemic may be dense urban areas with strong social distancing, and emergency door-to-door support.

Drawing the Right Lessons

We have done far too little to prepare for the risk posed by big cities tightly connected with other cities around the globe. If ideas can spread virally through these networks, of course viruses can too.

The solution, however, is not to shut down our downtowns and retreat to the exurbs. We benefit enormously from the complex, intertwined human networks that make today’s cities so dynamic, innovative, and fun. But it’s crazy to not have an emergency off-button ready to shut down those networks when we need to. Hopefully, before the next pandemic hits, we’ll be ready to press that button. 

Top image: A screenshot from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Captured March 18, 2020.

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Tristan Cleveland is an urban planner with Happy City. He is also a PhD candidate at Dalhousie University's Healthy Populations Institute, studying how to ensure communities are designed to support human health.

You can connect with Tristan on Twitter at @LUrbaniste.

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