Good evening everyone:

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We have all been experiencing the endless, painful ways in which life in cities not only has changed, but may well be changed for a very long time. I thought one of the most provocative takes on that change was offered by our friends at the Bloomberg CityLab, a part of the Bloomberg suite of companies that publishes thought-pieces about cities. I’ve linked to the full article here, but wanted to provide the very-short-form version of some of the most interesting ideas.

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The thread throughout is distancing and space – people need more of it despite density being the overriding bias of the last generation of urban development and planning. As I noted in one of my notes last week (7.8.20), something like the Greenbelt house draws the inside outside and the outside inside. That same impulse will categorize the entries on the Bloomberg list. 

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Think dining in the open air, rather inside re-jiggered restaurant spaces. Or parking lots becoming the new venues for parks, drive-in movies, and concerts. Or the implosion of indoor retail shopping in favor of on-line ordering, deliveries, and pick-up. Or grocery stores instituting all sorts of techniques (electronic sensors, one-way markings on the floor, plastic sheets protecting cashiers) to limit the number of people who can be in the store at one time and the nature of the interactions once they’re there. Or sports events with very different spectator configurations.

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It’s hard to sort out the complex, but potentially temporary, ways in which urban interactions will have to be re-oriented. It’s probably even harder, though, to know whether – and the extent to which – the virus will require longer-term reconceptualization. The Bloomberg article suggests a number of areas in which what we might assume are short-term adjustments may, in fact, be predicates – and instigations – for longer-term change. Just a couple of examples.

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Re-thinking Mass Transit. This is a tough one to predict. Think of the prototypic scenes in New York or Tokyo – there is really no way to capitalize on the efficiencies of mass transit if people can’t stand or sit close together for prolonged periods of time. You can leave the windows open in a bus, but in a subway? You can stagger rush-hours, but how do you balance the transit agency’s budget when fewer people are riding? You can have contact-less fare systems, but what about the unbanked? So, one can reasonably assume that these systems will be sub-optimized until we develop a vaccine.  

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But . . . Bloomberg suggests that we may be laying the foundation for longer-term changes in commuting patterns as services are cut, people work remotely, and transit becomes more expensive. We’ve already seen one unintended – albeit welcome – consequence of changing transit patterns: the reclamation of streets for bicycles, wheelchairs, pedestrians, and strollers; I’d be surprised if that is rolled back anytime soon.

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Redefining “Essential Workers.” Who would have thought that the driver who delivers your Thai food, groceries, and Amazon items, would morph into an essential service? Perhaps that new awareness will help elevate the status, the protections, and the wages of those we’ve long known to be essential: hospital employees, transit drivers, childcare providers, teachers, and countless others. One can only hope that this will, in fact, be an enduring and powerful shift in our awareness, priorities, and behavior.

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Re-purposing Retail Space. This didn’t need COVID to materialize, but it is a trend that will almost certainly be accelerated by the virus. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if artists, entrepreneurs, social service organizations, and other community organizations could be given the opportunity to re-think and re-tool these spaces in ways that draw people from the community in? We’ve seen previous examples of extraordinary creativity and scale along these lines – for example, the scores of Sears buildings (in both Memphis and Minneapolis, more than a million square feet put to new use) throughout the country that have been converted into others uses.  

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Re-sizing the Hotel Industry. A bit like retail space, we may be looking at an industry that doesn’t return to its pre-virus normal. It’s fascinating to contemplate whether – a bit like retail – a sliver of the excess capacity couldn’t somehow be converted to social purpose, such as landing-places for people experiencing homelessness. That could well become even more compelling if the dreadful prospect of a tsunami of post-COVID rental housing evictions and mortgage foreclosures becomes real, creating exponentially higher rates of homelessness.

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There are, to be sure, countless other ways in which COVID will make a permanent imprint. I offer these just to suggest that a return to the old “normal” of city planning, infrastructure, and social engagement is probably the wrong way to think about our future. 

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Rip