Pandemic Urbanism: Thoughts on How Our Cities Will Change as a Result of Covid-19
It seems almost an obligatory cliché to start a thought piece on Covid-19 by emphasising the sheer scale of the pandemic. Yet, this is for good reason. Every conceivable facet of life on earth has been coloured in some way by the events of 2020, with the processes and systems of modern life thrown into sharp relief. Times of significant upheaval initially allow for spaces of reflection, where modes of thought entwined with what preceded, dominate. Yet, after some time these thoughts shift towards the future. This is encapsulated with desires and plans to ease and eventually end the various lockdowns, quarantines and social distances across the globe, all of which are infused with a desire to return to ‘normal’.
However, what constituted pre-pandemic normality is now a shadow, cast by the practices of the past. We rush headlong into the ‘new normal’, a term which has become shorthand for an unknown future espoused by politicians, advertisers, journalists and the public alike. No one knows what the future holds, that much has remained the same, yet the opacity of what is to come is not a deterrent for enquiring or thinking about what could constitute this new normal. Therefore, what follows are some thoughts on what impacts and changes could be ushered in by Covid-19 on one element of modern life; our cities. These thoughts are informed through analysing the roll out of pandemic related technologies across the globe — contact tracing apps, drones, infrared heat sensors and phone tracking are a few examples — as well as my own personal insights from years of researching urban sociology. Below are the six changes which are potentially afoot in our cities:
1. The Organisational Restructuring and ‘De-Siloization’ of Cities
2. Reduction in Office Based Working
3. Increased Movement Monitoring
4. Accelerated or Expanded Roll Out of Enhanced Internet and 5G Technology
5. Sanitised Public Space
6. The ‘Permissive’ City
1. The Organisational Restructuring and ‘De-Siloization’ of Cities
Amongst many other things, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the interconnectedness of different and disparate functions within our cities. On the surface, departments as diffuse as public transportation and health are unrelated apart from their geographical location. Yet, given how the virus moves from person to person, its spread highlights how cities function via a codependency of services. With the desire to ‘track and trace’ the virus, municipalities are leaving no stone unturned in the quest to understand the manner in which the pandemic flows through their city. Therefore, different departments within cities are having to work together and share data, resources and information. This phenomenon is an acceleration of an already active process.
One element in the roll out of the ‘smart city’ — essentially the infusion of digital technologies and urban infrastructures — is the dismantling of the so-called ‘silo effect’. According to the introductory chapter of Richard Sennett’s book Together, the silo effect is ‘the isolation of individuals and departments in different units, people and groups who share little and who indeed hoard information valuable to others’. Cities in their quest for a tacit understanding of Covid-19, desire as much information as possible in dealing with the crisis, therefore these silo’s present a major obstacle in achieving this goal. An example of a silo in this context would be an app being used by the municipality to trace and track the virus, but the app only provides data to certain parts of the city’s authorities, not in its entirety, thus denying potentially useful information.
This openness is an acceleration of an existing process and indeed some cities are already operating in this manner. Glasgow, for instance, already has an operations centre up and running, which collects data from a number of different sources, from CCTV footage to traffic management in an attempt to “provide a co-ordinated, real-time, intelligence-led, response to incidents large and small across the city”. This operational centralisation which brings together diffuse and diverse sectors of the city under one roof is a literal manifestation of silo eradication and is predicted here to become a component of urban development going forward.
2. Reduction in Office Based Working
Another theme contained within the societal adjustment to Covid-19 is the proliferation of people working from home. Millions of workers, as a result of various governmental interventions across the globe have begun to work from home rather than in an office. For cities this development, if continued after lifting of social distancing measures, could be massively disruptive. How? Well, city centres are full of offices and office buildings. Take as an example the City of London where, according to the City of London Corporation, “offices dominate land use in most parts of the City” — taking up an estimated total of 9,165,000 gross square metres. If say 10% of the City of London’s office based workforce begin to work from home, this could free up 916,000 square meters of space and as the average size of a U.K home is 85 square meters, this is enough space for over 10,000 new homes in the centre of London. Obviously this is a crude estimate, but it does demonstrate the scale of these potential changes afoot.
Asides from the physical properties of these offices, a decrease in the number of office based workers is potentially transformative in other ways. Firstly, a large percentage of public transportation use is for commuting, in fact in 2016 over half (58%) of all trips by surface rail are for either commuting or business purposes. If less people are required to commute, there will be less strain on public transport at peak times and the nature of using said transport will change, with a shift in focus from primary work and occupational means to leisure.
Secondly, Londoner’s have on average the longest commute across the U.K (46 minutes on average in 2016) which eats into a large proportion of their day. Numerous people also commute into London from further afield, which adds even more time onto an already lengthy commute. Therefore, if the option to work from home is available, many may take it, which in turn has a knock on effect in determining where these workers will choose to live. A major consideration and influence upon where people choose to live is their proximity to work; hence why many choose to live in cities which offer up smaller and more expensive housing but are closer to work. If this need is nullified through being able to work from home, the shape and nature of urban housing will be set to change. This prediction rests on whether home working becomes somewhat normalised after social distancing measures are relaxed, but it is certainly a realistic possibility.
3. Increased Movement Monitoring
As referred to above, technology has been a central component to numerous governmental strategies in combating Covid-19, with the desire to use apps to track and trace the spread of the virus being a measure found across the globe. The roll out of these technologies has not escaped criticism however, which ranges from a lack of useability and accuracy to issues of government surveillance and digital rights infringement. Yet, for cities the data conjured up and revealed through contact tracing would be invaluable.
In many ways the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to digital tracing. In the haste to compile digital solutions to the crisis, examples of pre-existing monitoring technologies have been revealed. For instance, in Austria where tracking technology which is “normally used to track where tourists go after they visit an important destination” has been used to track potential positive cases of Covid-19. Data which reveals use patterns and personal mobility within cities is valuable to a municipality, especially for ‘last mile’ mobility solutions. Through contact tracing data, one can ascertain where an individual has not only been within a city, but how long they have been somewhere and who they have been with. With this information replicated by thousands upon thousands of individuals every day, a city could use this information to tailor their transportation services to better deal with congestion in certain places, place more police in a busy park or monitor and manage crowds after big cultural and sporting events.
There could also be public services provided by tracing technology. For instance, a form of Covid-19 weather report could be developed, where tracing apps have tracked people who have had the virus and could produce warnings about locations they had visited before they had been picked up by the system. An app could be produced with a layered map which reveals where Covid-19 positive individuals have been and in turn, can produce warnings for users along the lines of ‘your nearest Tesco Metro is currently unsafe’. After it has been cleaned, it could then be safe to return. Another use could be to find quiet parts of cities to relax and find some solitude. Of course these public services would hinge on the tracking and tracing of the public.
This increased surveillance is certainly an encroachment upon the digital rights of those being tracked. Yet, it isn’t a dystopian fantasy to envisage a city adding contact tracing technology to a public transportation app or smart card and presenting a ‘choice’ to the user; either use public transport and be tracked, or don’t use it at all. Measures such as these aren’t solely the domain of technologically savvy totalitarians such as Putin or Xi Jinping but could creep into urban life within democratic nations under the auspices of pandemic prevention. The question is whether a city wants to place access to data and information or individual privacy at the centre of their post-crisis development.
4. Accelerated or Expanded Roll Out of Enhanced Internet and 5G Technology
The three subjects above all contain one common thread; the centrality of the internet. For, you need the internet to link different sensors and information flows to run a central operations centre al a Glasgow, to work from home and to track and trace residents and visitors to a city. Therefore, the next element of post crisis urbanism is the accelerated roll out of improved internet capabilities. A cornerstone within the aforementioned smart city is the provision of super-fast internet and improved connectivity, be this public wifi, low-power wide-area networks to connect various sensors or the development of 5G infrastructure. For a city and its residents to rely upon networked technology, solid internet infrastructure is needed. Full fibre internet is one example of the improvement of this, with numerous cities installing it.
Another is the surprisingly contentious 5G network. Eschewing the baseless conspiracy theories which abound, 5G is set to usher in
connected infrastructure, turning everything from lamp-posts and roads, to bins and bike racks into smart objects. In other words, the “internet of things”. The most obvious and exciting revolution that 5G will help is in transport. With ubiquitous, ultra-low-latency connections it means cars, buses and roads could all talk to each other in real time, warning drivers of incidents, patches of black ice or removing the need for the driver at all, in the world of self-driving cars. Other predicted services include all manner of robots, augmented reality, mobile gaming and of course super-fast video downloads.
Cities are already looking to embed 5G infrastructure within their own legacy networks and the desire to analyse and understand the city through data and sensing is set to accelerate within a post crisis environment. This apparent reliance on the internet will require it to be whatever the digital equivalent of bullet proof is. Patchy signals and intermittent functioning will morph from being a relatively trivial annoyance to an economic hindrance with the same ramifications as power cuts. Therefore, the beefing up of internet infrastructures, or indeed its acceleration, is essential. The above sections have all highlighted either physical or certainly tangible alterations to the urban fabric. The subsequent sections deal with more experiential changes.
5. Sanitised Public Space
Throughout this piece I have alluded to the use of technology in combating Covid-19, be it contact tracing, infrared heat sensing, UVC light cleaning or drones, each have been used somewhere during the crisis. The sanitisation of public space concerns two elements, a literal sanitisation, as in the elimination of infectious microbes and a social sanitisation which concerns how we will use these spaces.
The efforts to sanitise public space come in many forms. There are literal deep cleaning measures, from the increase in use and visibility of hand sanitizer and antibacterial spray to disinfect surfaces, to the aforementioned digital monitoring and tracing. In public spaces such as squares, malls and gardens, plazas, parks and piazzas, a combination of the two is set to be utilised. The microbial paranoia which has followed the virus in tow, will lead to cities wishing to make their public spaces as safe as possible, which in turn, leads to their sanitisation. In parallel to the physical act of sanitisation, there will also be a technical response. From contact tracing apps, to UVC light sterilization, in conjunction with drones that can identify people with high temperatures who cough and sneeze in public (see below). A combination of these efforts could be rolled out to make public spaces safe again in a physical sense.
Yet, even with the best of intentions, cities may also sanitise the social elements of public space. Sanitised public spaces already exist in a metaphorical sense. The aforementioned Richard Sennett touches upon this issue in his 1974 work The Fall of Public Man where he discusses the Brunswick Centre in London, a concrete modernist space which comprises two opposing buildings which create a central concourse in between the two of them. For Sennett, this concourse “is an area to pass through, not to use; to sit on one of the few concrete benches in the concourse for any length of time is to become profoundly uncomfortable, as though one were on exhibit in a vast empty hall”. This is the essence of public space which is here predicted to proliferate after the Covid-19 crisis, space where a combination of surveillance and sanitorial measures place any user of it upon an exhibitionist plinth before an audience of drone pilots, CCTV cameras and contact tracing applications. A panoptic future may await many urbanites, yet the notion of surveillance already exists in our cities, why will this be different. Well, the sanitisation of public space is likely to become a pressing issue for many cities across the globe. In Delhi for instance, drones which are fitted with cameras and speakers are being used to ‘disinfect’ slums within the city, thus representing the literal sanitisation of space without human interaction.
Now, I am not saying that every city in the world will be equipped with a fleet of chemical spraying drones, but the sanitisation of public space will be prevalent. In a certain sense cities should be dirty, or certainly messy, disordered. It is within these spaces of disorder that urban life flourishes, where chance encounters and interaction between strangers proliferate amongst the intimate anonymity of, say, a market place. Will the messy essence of these spaces survive the pandemic? Only time can tell, but on the surface it would seem difficult to keep these spaces dermatologically safe whilst at the same time remaining socially vibrant.
6. The ‘Permissive’ City
Under lockdown measures in Moscow, Baku or Beijing a resident will need permission to use public transport and even just leave the house. In the Russian capital, personalised QR codes are issued by city hall which permit citizens to travel around the city. You’ve been caught outside without one, then expect a $400 fine. In Azerbaijan residents are required to get special permission from police every time they want to leave their homes and in China, the Alipay Health Code ranks its user green, yellow or red as an indicator of their health status — according to the New York Times:
A green code enables its holder to move about unrestricted. Someone with a yellow code may be asked to stay home for seven days. Red means a two-week quarantine.
Now an obvious theme which courses through these three cases is the spectre of totalitarianism. These are three countries which have what amounts to dictatorial governance and therefore bear no resemblance when being compared to the democratic west, right? Well, the final section of this work argues that it is not a farfetched rumination of dystopic thought to imagine London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam or Barcelona, in the very near future, utilising comparable technologies and measures akin to the above cases.
An overriding theme here is the desire for city authorities to increase their understanding, and thus in a certain sense, control over the cities they govern. Be it the centralisation of their managerial structures, measuring and monitoring how people move through their city or the intended eradication of the virus in public spaces; a sense of control permeates. Now, cities are practically by definition dense, crowded and social — thus perfect locales for the proliferation of disease, and with the tentacles of our urbanised world intersecting with previously untouched nature, some convincingly argue that the Covid-19 pandemic is a sign of things to come, not a one off historical anomaly. So, with further pandemics looming on the horizon, cities will need to prepare for future outbreaks.
An interesting aside with all this is the fact that what was considered deeply personal is now of public interest. Before the pandemic crisis, many of us have either been in the position of being, or have witnessed, an unwell commuter battle their way into work on public transport, coughing, sneezing and sniffling. Before this was a frustrating annoyance, the worst that could happen was that you would catch their cold. Yet, as a result of the pandemic, public health and health in public spaces has taken precedence. Currently, if you have a high temperature, a cough or flu-like-symptoms you are practically ordered to self isolate. Before we may have been inclined to persevere and carry on into work, but now our own personal ailments could seriously harm others. Yet as referred to above, there are urban technologies which can detect these symptoms and alert you or the authorities to take appropriate action — thus denying you the ability to occupy social space or use public transport.
Therefore, using these technologies, a municipality would have the ability to determine who is healthy and who is falling ill and ultimately who has permission to engage in public life. Of course not every illness after the pandemic now contains a murderous pathogen, but the chance that it could, no matter how small, may be enough for cities to be on the lookout. By combining data from drone footage (identifying someone who has symptoms), contact tracing (who this person has been in contact with and where), data from health records (whether those who have been in contact with the unwell individual have any health risks), social media (to further ascertain where and who with this individual has been) and general individual data sets (census results, address, occupation information etc.) and running it through machine learning software, a municipality can in short order obtain a detailed picture of whether this individual and whoever they have been in proximity to is a public health risk. If they are not, then they have permission to use the city as they normally would — in China they would be green. If they have been in proximity to someone who is ill but are yet to have symptoms or indeed are confirmed to have them, then they could be denied access to the public sphere.
How this would be enforced is another matter. Municipalities could go for clunky measures such as fines or using the police like in Moscow and Azerbaijan, but in China, the Alipay Health Code operates through a user’s phone which in many cases also contains their digital wallet, transport tickets and personal identification. Therefore it could be the case that if an individual registers as unwell, they could have all of these features temporarily disabled — the contactless feature could stop working and their metro ticket could become invalid — to prevent them from entering into the public. Either way, cities across the world are on a trajectory to become cashless and smart travel apps are an emerging feature of everyday urban life. Therefore, we have the technology in place, as well as the prerequisite adoption of them, for these measures to become an element of post-crisis urban life.
Conclusion
This piece started with a rumination on the vast impact of Covid-19 on the way in which we all live our lives; practically nothing has been left untouched and everything which has been will be changed in some way. The city is certainly going to change, the question is how. These predictions/thoughts are based on the study and analysis of pre-Covid-19 urban technology and the smart city, alongside an analysis of the global roll out of technology to combat the pandemic. Both the technologies which originated before the virus and as a result of it, share a crucial similarity. They both seek to analyse and reveal that which is not perceptible to us humans, things like air quality, traffic flows and of course, internal body temperature, to name a few, are all revealed and understood as a result of these technologies. Technology in and of itself won’t change the world, but rather how it is utilised, shall. Therefore the onus falls upon the very municipalities and governments who may seek to implement these technologies to use them in a manner which is beneficial for all urban inhabitants. To shape and guide this, an essential role for residents, businesses, NGOs and community activists is cast. For it is the responsibility for every resident, user and commuter in a city to mold its future and strive towards making something harmonious out of the disarray of our current malaise. Whether the above thoughts/predictions are desired or otherwise, they are not a given, they are to be created and shaped by the very cities in which they may come to pass.
By Will Brown
Doctoral Researcher Loughborough University
w.brown@lboro.ac.uk
