The Planet of Cities: It’s too soon to sort the Covid-19 winners and losers

If you were to rank the cities best placed to emerge from the pandemic with their reputations enhanced, you’d likely settle on one of two lists.

The first would include cities such as Taipei, Athens, Singapore, Seoul and Kyoto; those in which infection and morbidity rates have remained low. This, it is widely presumed, is the result of successful public health endeavours and clear, credible political leadership. These are the cities that, in the unsettling early days of the pandemic, were able to quickly regroup and effectively safeguard their people.

The second list would include the likes of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Geneva and Vancouver – all cities that traditionally score well on indices measuring quality-of-life and economic dynamism. Their combination of job opportunity and low-to-medium density living is likely to seem increasingly attractive when the Covid-19 dust settles.

The events of 2020 so far will comprise only the opening chapter in the story of this pandemic and its effects. Many of those cities rightly celebrated for their response to the first wave of infections are now speaking in ominous tones about the likelihood of a second. The duration of any period of immunity enjoyed by Covid-19 survivors remains unclear. It is, then, fair to say that low levels of infection in one cycle will not guarantee low levels of infection in any subsequent cycles. As such, those cities on the first list have much work still to do. They can take great encouragement from their successes so far.

While we talk of second waves, it is important to acknowledge that, in many parts of the world, the first wave is yet to crest. We are seeing levels of infection beginning to rise in India, with most experts predicting similar in store for Africa.

There may be reasons to assume that different cities will become resilient to Covid-19 in different ways. It would be folly to assume that the blueprint for future resilience will be medium-density, high-amenity living, for instance. The nature of success, and failure, will differ according to the city.

Take, for example, Hong Kong, New York and London. As three ultra-high-performing global cities, they are often held to be comparable. All are major hubs of finance and innovation, and extraordinarily influential on the global stage. They attract people from every corner of the globe and simultaneously reward and reap the rewards of their diverse citizenries. But for each, the route to resilience will be mapped by what makes them unique, rather than alike – namely, their distinct social and physical geographies.

The extreme density of Hong Kong, for instance, will require that the city’s public transport and commercial real estate is assiduously health-assured. If the authorities are successful in this, the “new normal” may not look drastically different to the pre-Covid-19 norm.

In New York, more digitally mature than Hong Kong, remote working solutions will be a long-term fixture for many. The places of America’s north east are connected by a high-speed rail corridor and well-developed domestic aviation sector. The Big Apple is ripe for transition to the blended city model.

London, though dense in its centre, is actually a sprawling network of villages and towns covering twice the land area of its trans-Atlantic cousin. It is quite plausible that the legacy of Covid-19 will be various and localised within London’s wide-mapped boundaries. This polycentric, distributed form of urbanisation will require significant investment in the city’s second and third tier locations. But its core districts, too, will require rejuvenation.

The distinct endowments and physical attributes of these cities will both necessitate and facilitate distinct approaches to recovery. There is no common rulebook for megacity resilience and no shared guarantee of success. This reality is truer still in our Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities.

With all this in mind, it is still too soon to split the world into winners and losers according to pandemic performances so far. Aside from the fact that nobody wins from such an appalling human tragedy, any declared result would be premature. While the successful development and wide distribution of a vaccine remains an uncertain eventuality, our understanding of how the post-Covid-19 reality will look is vague at best.

We, furthermore, do not know which of the innovations prompted by the pandemic will have any genuine stickability in our post-Covid-19 urban life. We’re currently in a period of necessary experimentation; it’s absolutely fair to assume that not all current practices and procedures will endure. Emergency measures are rarely productive or sustainable in the long run.   

Finally, while the pandemic is currently, rightly, viewed as primarily a public health crisis, its most profound long-term legacy may well be economic. We do not know yet how the twin drivers of reformed global supply chains and digitalisation will play out. A move towards greater sovereign capability will require many developed economies to boost their manufacturing base. What will this mean for cities that have long since been deindustrialised? Another great reconfiguration of the urban economy seems imminent. It will take vastly different forms, and produce vastly different results, even in seemingly comparable locations. We’re talking here about far reaching, structural change and it therefore makes limited sense to seek to draw conclusions at this early point.

Any data that we can reference at this point will provide us with only a temporary snapshot. The long view of history can, though, be more instructive. Major cities are rarely the birthplaces of technological revolutions; they do, though, tend to be the places where revolutionary technologies are fully commercialised and capitalised.

None of this is to say that is it not useful to monitor current pandemic performance around the world. There is much to learn, and much to interest us, from making comparisons. But I believe that we will be having a version of this discussion for many years to come. To borrow a phrase, we are not at the end of the Covid-19 story, nor even at the beginning of the end. We may, though, have reached the end of the beginning.