Post Pandemic Urbanism Australia: The Merge Scenario
The year 2025. A young woman returns home, transiting indifferently through the city. The urban immune system, matching personal health data with real-time biometric sensors indicates a potential infection. Her mobile device anonymously alerts each compatible device she passes, while an autonomous taxi discreetly arrives and she is prompted toward a less densely populated route.
This hypothetical scenario raises obvious questions of personal privacy, balancing the need for population level biometric sensing and individual freedoms. However, certain freedoms will be limited if urban environments are to become shining beacons of tightly automated sterility, dispersed among vast nature-reserves.
As human populations respiratorily flow between these domains, smart-cities and nature may become a symbiotic organism, serving the health of their human populations and forming a greater harmony with and respect for the planet.
Australia escaped the worst effects of 1919’s Spanish flu pandemic, as international transport by sea made maritime quarantine possible; while many of the infected recovered or perished before reaching the nation’s shores. As we face the current pandemic, the technology platforms of Google, Amazon, Uber and the like have become central to our newly established way of life. They satisfy a need, of which no other institution is capable; delivering meals, packages and entertainment and supporting otherwise halted industries. Much of this supporting role has shifted to the digital framework that underpins our urban environments and this will likely accelerate as we emerge from the coming economic downturn. Legacy systems may prove too cumbersome to survive a restriction of social interaction; and as the financial imperative for efficiency takes hold, we will likely see a shift in market share toward the automation based society so emphatically espoused by Silicon Valley.
An autonomous contact-tracing system being co-developed by Apple and Google will use encrypted, constantly changing codes, transmitted over Bluetooth. No location data will be collected and once opted-in, each person’s device will maintain a log of nearby transmissions, notifying them upon possible contact with an infected individual.
Similar systems have been relatively successful in Singapore and South Korea, with Australia’s COVIDSafe app recently being released; and will be necessary to facilitate a reopening of the global economy, as billions of traced devices will allow public health services to automatically request that individuals self quarantine.
Israel on the other hand, will deploy anti terrorism surveillance technology to carry out contact tracing without consent; raising the question of whether these new powers of mass surveillance will be rescinded post pandemic, or be inextricably woven into the digital layers of urban governance.
There is a hope that our heightened emphasis on human health will accelerate the adoption of more sustainable systems, from private robo-taxis and delivery drones, free from risk of infection; to renewable energy generation, urban farming and health monitoring wearables.
The University of Lincoln’s Creighton Connolly believes that, “decentralisation of services and reducing density are ways to combat disease spread, though this is contrary to sustainable transport and climate-change related goals… achieving longer-term changes in urban planning will depend on improving the way we see, understand and address health and living conditions.”
Cities’ virtual replicas, or ‘digital twins’ will integrate real time population data collected from biometric sensors to create a more robust, interwoven urban sensing-layer; and statistical modeling in public governance will develop, as the physical and virtual become further enmeshed.
As early examples, Hong Kong’s MTR has begun deploying hydrogen-peroxide mist-bots to disinfect trains once an infection has been reported in an area; and the UK’s University of Newcastle is enabling urban sensor arrays, through machine learning, to measure social distancing adherence.
As the distinction becomes less clear between urban environments and the populations within, perhaps we must view cities as emergent networks of individuals that increasingly resemble living organisms; with this analogy becoming less abstract in the age of automation and epidemiology centred governance.
In the case of Australia, its vast expanses of open land afford it among the lowest average population densities on Earth. However, the nation’s rapid integration with Asia has brought both economic prosperity and increased urban density, with some areas as tightly populated as Singapore or Hong Kong. Australia must balance its public health imperative with the need for efficiency in the face of climate change, the worst-case effects of which will cause vastly more damage to human wellbeing and economic prosperity.
This series of challenges may necessitate a more top-down approach to urban planning, tighter restrictions of grass roots urbanism and design of urban areas led increasingly by data analysis and healthcare metrics. Urban design is likely to become more segregated and automated, with less human contact required; and the current greening of city roads, conversion to pedestrian walkways and more ventilated civic spaces is a step toward this, while maintaining the vital human aspects of urbanism.
A confluence of ill-informed systemic decisions has led to a breaking point both ecologically and in human health; with cities accounting for 75% of global carbon emissions. From a policy perspective, it will be the role of governments, private companies and individuals who comprise society to manage the necessary reforms.
Sustainability professor Peter Newman of Australia’s Curtin University predicts that the post-pandemic 2020s will see a new green revolution. “As we came out of the last depression… across the world, we built our cities around the car… we’re going to transform our cities yet again… with renewables and electric vehicles… it’s going to be an era of significant change as we begin a new economy that’s much more regenerative for the environment… Let’s start again. Let’s do it better,” Newman says.
Just as past pandemics in London, New York and more recently Singapore, forced the development of improved sanitation, public transit and medical infrastructure respectively, Australia must recognise now more than ever, the economic imperative for a model of urbanism centred around collective human health and wellbeing, enabled by emerging technologies.
Australia’s comparative advantage in renewable energy generation will support this increasing reliance on technology, while benefiting the health and economic prosperity of surrounding populations, as has been the case with the South Australian Tesla-Hornsdale battery reserve.
This pandemic has revealed our analogy to individual cells in a global organism, whose wellbeing ebbs and flows collectively, with little disconnect between urban and human health, public policy and individual choice.
Without succumbing to a state of naive techno-optimism, society at all levels must not neglect the reality that so clearly affronts us, but act to address the consequences of our collective failures. Urban areas must evolve to protect their human inhabitants while mitigating effects on the surrounding environment; the economic imperative for which is unprecedented, as we meet the challenges of climate change.
We have reached an ultimatum; retreat into isolation or embrace our interconnectedness. The innovators of the world beckon us forward while the momentum of the system upon which our society is built weighs heavy; but this economic downturn may create the levelling effect required to construct the future that many so desperately strive toward.
