QR Code Cities and the Battle for Public Space
How can we design healthy cities in a post-COVID-19 future?
“Never let a good crisis go to waste” Winston Churchill famously said in the mid1940s, when the end of World War II was approaching, and an alliance between him, Stalin and Roosevelt gave rise to the United Nations. Now, with most cities affected by coronavirus, we have a unique chance to take the same perspective on post-COVID-19 urbanism and ask: How will we design healthy cities in the future? Discussing this with Sara Carr, professor of architecture at Northeastern University, she tells me: “Pandemics like cholera, yellow fever and tuberculosis peaked before vaccines were available, which forced cities to combat them through the built environment and push the boundaries of urban design.” An example is the way that cholera, in the mid-1800s, led to a sanitation movement and advocacy for municipal waste and water systems. Professor Carr explains: “Underground plumbing transformed the urban layout as it meant digging up the streets, making them wider and straighter. Smooth pavement replaced cobblestone to make streets cleaner, and parks were built to function as the lungs of the city.” We have even seen architectural movements like modernism spin out of an obsession with cleanliness. Similarly, COVID-19 today stands to reshape cities by bringing about renewed idealisation of the rural and hyper-localism, and a reconfiguration of home and workplace. But in response to the crisis, public space, in particular, has become a critical area of contention.
The pandemic has caused many cities to revisit the capacity of their street networks, with for instance Bogota, Milan and London announcing plans to design new biking infrastructures and car-free zones. Professor Carr comments: “More cities are learning that they need to plan for walkability and active mobility, breaking with the car-centric urbanism which has dominated for centuries.” But while some cities are realizing that resilience comes from access to public space, allowing for exercise and mitigating isolation, other cities take the opposite approach by limiting access to the public realm. We see this being very actively applied in China, where the authorities have rolled out anti-infection systems that use data from people’s phones to track their movements and identify those who have been diagnosed or have been in proximity to someone diagnosed with the virus. This is turned into health credentials on your phone, and whenever you try to enter a public place like a park, taxi, shop, bank or bar, you have to prove your health status by scanning your credentials on QR codes at the entrance. A green code and a low infection risk means you can enter; a yellow or red code means you are rejected. Poorer parts of the population living in greater density are more likely to receive bad credentials, resulting in an anti-democratization of the public realm.
Though restrictions are beginning to be lifted in China, the QR system is still inaction in many cities. Meanwhile, Russia has deployed a similar system, and in Poland, Singapore and South Korea, GPS-enabled apps are used in concert with IoT sensors to enforce ‘geofencing’ policies, drawing a virtual perimeter that marks the limit of your permitted zone of movement. This is a temporary measure — but what if it becomes the new normal? Giving up freedom in return for security is not unknown; in fact, it is one of the core motivations for humans to create the State and hand over sovereignty to it, as described by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651). We saw this during 9/11 — a crisis that was used to introduce more surveillance in everything from airports to museums, parks and streets. A “good crisis”, as Churchill would put it, does not necessarily pivot us into a healthier and more democratic society, but may also usher in increased social control. So, looking to the future, we must decide whether we will waste this crisis and let it result in the anti-democratization of public space, as we have witnessed in China’s QR code regime, or whether we can turn it into an opportunity to design healthier cities. To this Professor Carr adds: “What this crisis teaches us is also that we need to design public spaces that are flexible in times of crisis, like how parks in Boston were repurposed during COVID as emergency distribution centres. Design for flexibility will be key to making cities resilient and responsive.”
This story was originally published in Scenario Magazine
