The Planet of Cities: An accidental experiment in a new way of life

You’ll recall that last month, I posed three questions regarding the urban legacy of the Covid-19 crisis. I must say thank you to everyone who replied: the volume and quality of the responses that we received was wonderful to see. If you haven’t already, you can read a selection of the most thought-provoking answers here.

What is clear to me is that a great many agile and inquisitive minds are already considering how this pandemic might alter our relationship with the built and natural environment. A not insignificant number among them are members of our WBEF community.

For my part, I believe that there will be four steps on our return trip to normalcy:

• Lockdown, where the majority of us find ourselves at time of writing.
• Transition, or the slow easing of lockdown restrictions over the course of weeks or months.
• Recovery, in which we begin again those economic and social activities currently suspended.
• The New Normal, a state of being that, in all likelihood, would have seemed anything but normal to our prior selves.

The new normal will constitute the larger part of the Covid-19 urban legacy that you have joined me in pondering over this past month. We do not yet know how soon we can expect to arrive there, or for how long we will find ourselves stuck in each of the intervening stages. The speed of the journey is largely dependent upon how quickly we can achieve a medical breakthrough capable of bringing the disease under control. A rapid, comprehensively tested and universally available vaccine will greatly accelerate our progress. Without a widespread programme of inoculation, the development of herd immunity promises to be slow and excruciatingly painful.

Absent a vaccine, retroviral drugs will allow for the better treatment of the afflicted. Ubiquitous testing and contact tracing could pave the way for a system of health passporting – the precision management of infection. But these outcomes would necessitate the continued separation of the sick from the well; the high-risk from the low-risk. The latter would also require us to build comprehensive supporting infrastructures: what good is a passport without adequate passport controls?

In terms of our urban spaces, Covid-19 poses a huge challenge to leaders across public, private and knowledge sectors alike. Anyone hoping to navigate this challenge and emerge from the crisis with an intact or enhanced reputation or business model will need to consider the following factors.

Which cities, regions, industries and businesses have demonstrated resilience in the face of this crisis? Conversely, which have not? And what are the reasons for their contrasting fortunes? Which activities will be considered high or low risk in our new normal? In other words, what are the practices and behaviours that we should be incentivised to return or revert to, and what should be discouraged? And finally, what innovations can be deployed in order to risk assure public, private and professional spaces – not just against a recurrence of the Covid-19 virus, but any similarly disruptive events?

I want to use this column to focus on three spheres of our urban life: public transport; spaces for gathering; and buildings, or clusters of buildings, of high-density occupation. In each of these cases, I consider the leadership challenge to be especially pronounced, and the burden of correctly answering the above questions particularly heavy. In each case, the key to success will be to win citizen trust, investor confidence, and media buy-in. So, how can it be done?

For public transport bosses, there is a balance to be struck. Mass transit networks must be perceived to be safe; and due to their sizeable funding requirements, they must also be commercially viable. Social distancing will greatly reduce the capacity of buses, trams and trains and is therefore not a workable long-term solution – high-capacities are integral to the value proposition of urban public transport networks. Instead, network operators will need to invest in new cleaning technologies. The wearing of personal protective equipment, particularly face masks and gloves, is likely to become a requirement for commuters, either by fiat or general social expectation.

Health passporting, touched upon earlier, could feature. Most major urban transport networks have been digitalised; health passports could, therefore, be integrated into metrocard schemes. Indeed, the ability to demonstrate a clean bill of health may become a condition of travel equal in importance to the ability to pay.

To win commuters back, pricing incentives, along with reliability and functionality gains, will be key. Many of those who feel their health and safety to be compromised by public transport use will opt to travel by car. While this is a natural and understandable tendency, it must be disincentivised. A sizeable uptick in private vehicle use will greatly hinder urban mobility, impair liveability and have potentially catastrophic consequences for the environment. We simply cannot bear a return to the automobile as the preferred mode of urban transport. As such, investment in active travel infrastructure must be a priority: our cities must become walkable, cyclable. The need to decelerate car use could be achieved by the acceleration of dynamic road user charging. 

When we talk about gathering spaces, we might mean public parks, squares, stadia and other entertainment venues, conference centres, theatres, museums and other assets of cultural value, or educational institutions. As a category, it covers a wide range of land uses; the prescriptions for success in the new normal city are correspondingly varied, but there are also some common threads. These are dynamic spaces, in which people may choose to stay for long or short periods. In a world where virality and contagion are preponderant concerns, this represents an all too obvious concern.

In order to health assure these environments, we are likely to see the growth of omni-channel access options. In-person attendance of events and exhibitions is likely to be restricted, so as to facilitate safe social distancing; virtual solutions could be adopted to cover any consequent revenue shortfalls. This has long been part of how we consume professional sport; the model has been proven to work. Such an approach may have the added benefit of extending access to cultural spaces for people who might ordinarily have felt shut out. We can already see how live theatre, ballet, and music are going online.

It’s interesting, also, to consider how gathering spaces might fare in our best-case scenario – the world of the comprehensively available vaccine. The lockdown has caused many to rebalance their online and offline life; the ability to again mingle safely in public will not be enough to convince everyone back to pre-pandemic norms. Gathering spaces will need to seek out new competitive advantages, perhaps through the customisation of user-experiences, a greater element of surprise and a general diversification of offerings. An enriched range of experiences, combined with rigorous and reliable health and hygiene protocols could be enough to tempt us all back into the offline world.

Densely occupied buildings and clusters of buildings face a similar challenge: to reintroduce the advantages of a physical connection. What is it that you can do in the office, that you cannot do on a video call? The scope for collaborative working, creativity and agile decision-making is greatly enhanced by physical proximity. Any remaining doubts as to the feasibility of largescale remote working have been resolved; on that question, the toothpaste cannot be squeezed back into the tube. But those workplaces in which the advantages of face-to-face working are championed, while virtual working still encouraged, will be best placed to succeed.

One vital aspect to this will be in the social sphere. By embracing extra-curricular activities employers can encourage bonds of loyalty, affection and belonging among colleagues. It may be that the majority of our work will be done online, irrespective of which medical interventions ultimately prevail over the virus. But it will be in the offline space that we build our creative relationships and brand affiliations, and bank the social capital that they generate. This will be the principal purpose of much corporate real estate moving forward, and buildings will have to be reconfigured accordingly.   

In our attempts to manage and mitigate this crisis, we may have stumbled upon a new idea in urbanisation: that of the blended city. The blended city understands the efficiency and practicality of the digital space but seeks not to prioritise that at the expense of our deeper urge for physical communion and belonging.

This opens up the possibility of a more distributed urbanisation, which could take two forms. The first would be the spread of polycentric cities, in which the growth of secondary districts provides complementarity and adds capacity to traditional central business districts. The second would be an upscaled version of the first, in which the relationships between dominant cities and their second, third and fourth tier counterparts similarly change.

This crisis will not bring about the death of geography, but instead the ever-greater integration of our physical and digital worlds. In those places where the change is managed competently, and where the potential of the blended city is understood, our online and offline worlds will be mutually reinforcing. The city will have become omni-channel. That will be our new normal.