Covid-19 and Futures for City Planning
Mike Dobbins, April 9, 2020
In the broader contexts wherein the planning, design, and development disciplines perform, the virus pandemic and its interactive economic pandemic are jolting the world toward a future of “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.” Four years ago, Jonathan F. P. Rose in his book, The Well-tempered City, put forth this quartet of anxieties to characterize the “VUCA world” he saw us entering, now progressing at warp speed.
Forty-seven years ago, Stephen J. Gould, Harvard paleontologist, posited the course of the earth and human evolution as longish periods of relative stability and predictability, upended by occasional sudden and catastrophic events, followed by periods of earth-shaking readjustment. He termed this theory “punctuated equilibrium.” Now we have Covid-19 and an economic pandemic to go with it, not to mention the chaotic Trump presidency.
The wakes of these asymmetric pandemics will continue to roll up upon the world’s gradually inundating shorelines toward an unknowable future. The Covid-19 pandemic shows itself to be a grim, resolute, but more or less predictable wave over the long run. Its resolution will come in the form of self-isolation, testing, tracking, treatments that work, effective vaccinations, and changed human behavior over the next year or two….or three, or…..
The global economic pandemic, interactive with Covid-19 but with money its main metric, is less rational, experiencing wracking joblessness, paroxysms of fears and anxieties, wildly shifting speculations about unknowns, rumors, conspiracy theories, and herd behavior, with less easily predictable outcomes. The stock market rollercoasters sketch out these phenomena vividly, daily, as described by Robert Shiller.
Through greed and luck, many of the rich, with whom the vast majority of this nation’s private financial resources reside, will profit mightily from these fluctuations. Others might feel a little pain, causing some shuffling among the rankings of the 5000 billionaires, some of whom may fall to multimillionaire status. Few of these will experience any health consequences.
Common to both of these interacting pandemics, however, is that the poor, the health-challenged, and the marginalized, hundreds of millions of our fellow humans, will suffer devastating losses, in survival, in social dissolution, and in deaths.
In short, there will be no “return to normalcy.”
Everyone must ponder this question and its underlying contexts, across the fullest spectrum of impact, and share their ponderings broadly, transparently, and with their ears and brains open to each other, worldwide. The problems in these contexts are the grist for the mill for city planning theory and practice, and I hope and believe that my city planning and design colleagues are joining in on these ponderings.
I am an old planner, urban designer, and architect. I directed local planning, design, and development agencies for 35 years and for the last 23, I have taught these fields at Georgia Tech’s College of Design.
Where should I begin with my students this fall? With democracy, I believe. Democracy based on the tenet that all people and their lives should be valued equally, the “promissory note” as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, from the Declaration of Independence. Below, I share this experience and this belief of mine in the form of preliminary bullet-pointed observations and questions, aimed at better understanding what’s going on and at imagining a framework for action. I have arranged my bullet points according to normative city planning areas of study. In my experience, these areas are less important in themselves than in the multiple and shifting interactions that occur among them.
· Transportation:
o Car, lyft, uber, and taxi trips down, congestion down, air pollution down, crash deaths down
o Transit trips, air trips, rail trips, and passenger ship trips down
o Walking and biking trips up, and scooter trips‘ future uncertain
o To what extent will these patterns persist as the crisis eases?
· Communication:
o Sea change shifts in (and dependence on) digital means — internet, cloud, cell phone, and other devices for most communications purposes
o Will the gulf widening between who has access to digital means and currency and who does not accelerate disenfranchisement and marginalization? Or, may the gap begin to close, providing an avenue for all people to participate in and contribute to society?
· Settlement patterns:
o Shifts in thinking from ever-greater densification of centers toward poly-nucleated regions — and what happens to towns that are away from metro regions?
o Repurposing land uses and thus regulatory and investment structures to meet new trends and priorities:
§ Housing
§ Retail
§ Office space
§ Industry
§ Agriculture
§ Travel patterns, and
§ Health, education, and business campuses and malls, etc.?
· Health and environment:
o Health, individual and community, physical and mental, for the moment, maybe a long moment, must supersede environmental quality in priority, even as the Trump presidency sweeps away environmental protections across the board
o How these pandemic jolts might interact with the pace of climate change, however, and how to slow that pace and mitigate its effects persist as priorities for planners
· Economics:
o Capitalism, which has repeatedly reinvented itself to survive democratizing forces over the last couple of centuries, may be able to pull its fat out of the fire once again.
o Or, it may have run its course in the form we know it by eschewing any balance between profit and service, any effective public oversight, and any willingness to fairly reallocate the wealth to which we all contribute and that democracy and simple fairness demand
o So, has the system stretched its validity for most people to the breaking point? — a system many of whose leaders are showing their colors by exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic for personal or political gain
· Housing and community development:
o At the microscale, the torturous dismantlement of housing access along with dissolution of community cohesion, is running rampant, denying the minimum security for millions of people to adequately shelter, to make a living, to maintain health, to attain fact-based education, and to even participate in the hollowed-out shell of democratic processes — the vote, union representation, and so on
o The spatial and societal consequences of these forces are unknown, but are likely to be massive
· Urban design:
o As the most cross-disciplinary and integrative of the planning fields, urban design encompasses all of those forces that act to build the world we live in
o Thus, listening to all parties of interest in any development activity must shape future agendas for responding to the full range of human needs and aspirations
o In these times, the relationship between people and places is shifting rapidly, likely changing the communities and habitations where we live, the places where we gather, how we get there, environmental and health quality, how and where we make a living, how and where we learn
· Public policy:
o How might public policies, regulatory frameworks, resource allocation, and laws support rapidly changing needs and aspirations?
o How can implementation methodologies advance the city planning goal of making better places for everyone
· Methodologies:
o The current dominant planning focus on big data, smart cities, AI, and other quantitatively based technologies has put the balance between problem understanding and solution methodologies out of whack
o These data-driven technologies, very useful for looking backward and for managing what is, fail in looking forward, where data is speculative and narrowed down to fit the rigors of quantitative models
o Yet for some, these technologies have become ideologies, the belief that technology alone holds the keys to the future, and that problems must contort themselves into the “solutions” that technologies can offer
o In order to counter the inherent risks of this solutionism ideology, like its ripeness for cooptation by autocracies, respect for qualitative thinking and plain old commonsense needs to ramp up, and rapidly
o Will planners for the post Covid-19 world put purpose and meaning back into the forefront of their work?
o Will they seek to understand problems in all of their dimensions, their ever-changing dynamics, and their interactive relationships with the fullness of human experience
o If so, planners will come forward to frame a more useful and productive use of technology as a tool that is guided by purpose — the raison d’etre, the why we need to do this work; put another way, “people should be treated as an end in themselves, not as a means to something else” Immanuel Kant
o The use and employment of social media will continue to accelerate, for both good and ill, for both advancing fulfillment of peoples’ needs and for abetting nefarious purposes — what might be the checks and balances to promote the good and demote the bad? Or are we doomed to tolerate fake news to protect freedom of “information?”
o Might social media simply devolve into providing endless distractions from the weight of the VUCA world, its gross injustices, and the sense of helplessness to do anything about it? Are these distractions simply an update of satirist Juvenal’s “bread and circuses” characterization of purposeful distraction in Domitian’s reign — “artisan bread and virtual circuses”?
o Finally, and overall, will these methodologies serve to lift people out of poverty, to narrow the wealth gap, to move forward on the “promissory note” of valuing all human life equally? Or, will their very lack of access for most and their sequestration into the hands of moneyed elites and their “experts” drive us toward ever greater strife?
There is little doubt that we are in for a shock in these traditional areas of city planning practice and pedagogy. The duration of the crisis will determine the extent to which “getting back to normal” might occur as new habits and behaviors take hold. The interactions among these areas will have more impact than changes within each of them. Understandings at the local level, closer to and directly responsive to people, will provide much richer soil for devising and testing strategies to pull us out of these crises than most state level, and certainly federal level, planning.
So, think of these observations and questions as one old planner’s start-up menu for constructing frameworks to generate ideas, further analyses, and to sort out contingent courses of action — from now and into a range of possible futures. For now, every idea should be on the table. Every idea has pros and cons. Ruling any out at this point may channel past ways of thinking that may have shed their relevance. And, as planners, we should remember that we have plenty to learn from our past mistakes.
As I proceed, I will run ideas through an evaluation process, a filter that considers factors whose interactions with each other may point in the new directions called for in these times. Every idea has technical, organizational, political, financial, and cultural characteristics that need consideration. Toward action, every idea requires financial and regulatory resources, takes time, needs organizational will and capacity, the sussing out of which should reveal positive — or negative — impacts. Orders of magnitude comparisons, not precision, should get me going.
Let’s get out our trusty SWOT analysis tool (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), and together we can do this. How about an international post-Covid-19 planning symposium?
Below is a diagram that outlines all of the factors that interact with each other, randomly and across time, to make places. I call this diagram, cheekily, the Universal Interactivity Theory.
