The local pandemic
Observations on three ways the pandemic is likely to impact how we plan and think about city living going forward.
By the start of 2020, who would have thought we would spend most of the year battling a global pandemic of previously unknown potentially mortal virus? What would then have seemed like an unlikely future scenario borrowed from a sci-fi movie storyline, is something that now passes for normalcy.
At the same time, there’s nothing normal about this. From a medical point of view, one needs to remember that literally everything we know about the virus itself, the now familiar SARS-CoV-2 virus, are things the scientific community has found out in the past year or so. So we’re very much in uncharted waters here.
The fact that we’ve gotten used to this already says something about the human ability to adapt. Despite the vast impact the pandemic has had on many aspects of our society and our everyday lives (not counting being infected), we’ve gotten used to it. Doing meetings by video and working from home has become the new normal for many of us now. (Sales of sweatpants increased by 80 per cent in April in the US.)
That said, I do acknowledge my privilege of having a job that allows me to work from home in the first place, and then having enough space at home to work from. A lot of the coverage of the new normal of working remotely seems to miss the fact that not everyone in society is able to stay at home. All those that are delivering parcels and pad thai for lunch to us working from home are obviously not able to work remotely. They are often forced to keep working like nothing has changed, even as everything changed.
When talking about climate change we often worry about the inherent resistance we have to change our behaviours. But as we’ve seen this year, it went surprisingly quick for us to leapfrog a digital transformation that allowed us to use already available technology to practice distance socializing, all while maintaining social distancing. As it turns out, people are willing to change overnight, at least when one is facing the possibility of dying a slow and painful death as your respiratory system collapses.
If those changes will last is another question altogether. There’s been an increasing number of reports lately of how people (especially the young) are ignoring all those recommendations on keeping social distance and how they are attending parties packed with people and how they are socialising like crazy (both figuratively and literally).
As much as I find that kind of behaviour to be stupid, I do have to admit my own stupidity too. As much as I’d like to think of myself as a fairly fact-based person, I try not to be a bore around other people. I’ve avoided big groups of people since whenever being in big groups of people wasn’t cool anymore but last summer I attended a few dinners where more guests than expected turned up, and I didn’t object to it (because I’m trying not to be a bore).
We shared bread, drank lots of rosé and we’re enjoying ourselves the old fashioned way — and no one mentioned the pandemic. I guess we subconsciously were trying to distance ourselves from the pandemic itself, forgetting the anxieties of uncertainty that became a kind of normal last spring and for a moment fondly reenacting another normal from a past that now seems very distant; the summer of 2019.
If the virus was present at those dinners, I don’t know. If anyone got infected then, one cannot say. The scientific community still doesn’t know all the symptoms in which the virus announces itself in our bodies.
I understand how one might look upon this situation as if the virus is trying to teach us a lesson or two, but as philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy pointed out in an essay in Airmail, the virus is signifying nothing. And there will be no “day after” this, no evangelical version of the old Leninist “grand soir,” after which nothing would ever be as before because the “ideals of solidarity-equality-moderation” would have “gone viral.”
What we’re dealing with is a side effect of the fact that we live in densely populated cities, interact with a large number of people every day, and travel frequently. Being a zoonotic virus, SARS CoV-2 has the natural ability to jump from one species to another, and our way of life facilitated that jump. The virus itself has no lessons for us, but the human factors that enabled it to become a pandemic do.
There is no doubt that whatever we felt to be the old normal, that is long gone, but there might be no new to replace it. As David Wallace-Wells puts it in the Uninhabitable Earth, his frightening account of what global warming will look like, we’ve seen the end of the state of normal. Nothing will ever be normal again. We are indeed in uncharted waters.
During this year, I’ve kept a notebook where I’ve made some observations in order to structure my own thinking. What follows below is my take on the implications the pandemic might have on our way of life in cities going forward.
1. The pandemic did nothing for sustainability
On New Year’s Eve, I remember wishing for 2020 to bring something to make the idea of minimizing the personal climate footprint contagious. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. As the coronavirus lockdowns lifted, emissions went back up again, according to data from the Global Carbon Project. In China they are back at 2019 levels — a sharp reversal from earlier in 2020 when carbon dioxide levels in the country dropped by a quarter.
As apparent on this graph by Matthew Jones, after an initial decrease, American, European and Indian emissions followed similar patterns. All told, daily global emissions were a few percentages below 2019 levels at the end of the year, up from a peak reduction of 17% in April.
The draconian coronavirus lockdowns across the world have led to sharp drops in carbon emissions, but this will have “negligible” impact on the climate crisis, with global heating cut by just 0,01 degrees Celsius by 2030, a study has found.
But the analysis also shows that government funded green recovery / corona relief programs and shunning fossil fuels will give the world a good chance of keeping the rise in global temperatures below 1,5 degrees Celsius. As Bill Gates pointed out in his notes on the pandemic and climate change, what’s remarkable is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little.
Thus, I think it’s important that we don’t fool ourselves into thinking of this moment as a tipping point and citizens changing behaviour in order to curb climate change. The sharp decline in travel and the reason staycation became the thing of 2020, wasn’t at all related to sustainability but due to restrictions and fear of being infected. (As more people stayed at home global co2-emissions from the residential sector increased slightly.)
The tipping point of 2020 was only digital. By now, everybody has first-hand experience of what it’s like to meet without meeting in person, working together without working alongside each other and the advantages (and pitfalls) of working from home. Still, these massive behavioural changes were not made possible by the arrival of new technologies, as one might have expected, but by us all finally using technology that has been around for some time. Claiming that our ways of working became less stupid is more true than saying that they became smart.
In my view, we’re still overusing video meetings. But as we get increasingly fed up with staring at the wallpaper in our colleagues living rooms each day, I expect us to rediscover the advantages of group calls and to get a mutual understanding of when a meeting isn’t necessary at all. Doing a boring meeting in Zoom doesn’t make it less boring, and a virtual background doesn’t change that. That’s something I suspect we all learnt by now, the hard way.
Obviously, conferences will never be the same again. Attending virtual meetings this year have made us all realize that we never went to conferences to learn new things anyway. I expect fewer but much better conferences where the opportunity to accidentally meet new people is maximised, and where there are plenty of unplanned interactions or ways one can hang out with professional contacts and colleagues in a way one cannot do in Google Meet. (The best conference I know is aptly called The Conference and is designed to accomplish just that. Like everybody else they postponed lasts year’s event.)
One of the most important digital skills I acquired last year is probably a deeper understanding of when technology should not be used. Some of the face time we spend with friends, relatives and colleagues simply cannot be replaced with FaceTime calls. In some instances, it doesn’t matter how high resolution your phone has, it’s somehow still not enough. It might be one of the great paradoxes of 2020: how a digital tipping point made us appreciate analogue experiences. Some interactions are best experienced digitally and some are best in person, the same way I’d prefer to stream music some times and listen to it live at other times.
This duality is something urban planners and architects of all trades should keep in mind going forward. What physical activities do we want the built environment to encourage, and where? With 5G the ability to access cloud services are as omnipresent as the sky, interest in going offline is likely to rise. Should parks be treated as outdoor communal office spaces, or should they be considered to be offline areas, designed for mental as well as physical recreation? Regarding digital services as a way of augmenting reality, rather than competing with reality may be a way forward.
A remote-first approach to offices emphasises on-site collaboration and off-site deep-work. When this is applied to municipalities it frees up office space that could be used to provide new services for citizens. Parts of city halls could be available to citizens who are able to work remotely but are unable to get work done from home. Or why not make schools double as places where you could borrow a desk for a few hours in the afternoon to get work done, in return for helping kids with their homework?
And what outdoor communal areas? Not only should fast, free wifi be readily available, the public furniture might need some reconsidering too. What if city benches offered the ability to recharge your brain and your computer at the same time? There are already outdoor gyms, how about outdoor offices? What if communal tables in parks offered people a decent place to work as well as a place to eat? Add a parasol and a roof and people would be able to enjoy it on rainy days as well.
In the city of Göteborg, charging ports are available by every seat on a lot of buses, adding value to its citizens. By being strategic about where you can charge phones, computers, bikes and scooters (and offering it for free or at a low cost) architects and urban planners do have the ability to create attractive hotspots for interaction, play and work. At the same time, this would create incentives and tangible benefits in terms of sustainability and public health.
2. Quality of life matters
Whether the Swedish coronavirus strategy (recommendations to the public rather than restrictions) proves to be more or less successful in terms of the number of deaths in relation to other countries is still too early to say. What is already clear however is that the quality of life in Sweden has been higher than in other countries since there was no strict lockdown or curfew.
The Swedish strategy was more or less based on a textbook response on battling an epidemic. At first, the main focus is to limit the number of infected as much as possible. Then, if the outbreak cannot be contained, the strategy is to slow down the infection as much as possible in order to not overwhelm the healthcare system. But that’s easier said than done when the public calls for strict measures to save lives, and that explains why the decision to shut some cities and countries down was chiefly because of political concerns rather than on medical grounds. Each strategy has its own advantages and disadvantages. What might save some lives might kill small business as well.
Even though Sweden has seen a large number of covid-related deaths of business and people alike, the key message to the general public from the health authorities has constantly been to apply common sense. Not only does it appeal to a sense of belonging among the citizens, but also a display of trust that hopefully will be mirrored as increased trust in our institutions. (Which is what has happened.)
The time spent in solitude during our self-imposed corona quarantine has made me reflect on the little things that enhance our quality of lives. The time not wasted commuting. The opportunity to do video meetings in the comfort of your home literally half-dressed. The appreciation we feel when we discover that our local Thai restaurant has started offering delivery of our favourite comfort food.
I’ve also come to appreciate being outdoors more as well as the air itself, and I’m not the only one. Improved air quality has been one of the advantages of the lockdown. The pandemic even brought blue skies back to many cities, and, in some cases, cities are trying to make that change permanent. One of the things missed about being forced to be indoors in many cities was the ability to visit a park.
We know that people living more than one kilometre away from a green space have nearly 50 per cent higher odds of experiencing stress than those living less than 300 meters from a green space. The decision to impose curfews in some cities in order to keep people at home is likely to have contributed to that stress even further, on top of not knowing how the corona pandemic will affect your livelihood.
In addition to introducing further restrictions and temporary lockdowns, local authorities should introduce pop-up-parks to every neighbourhood that lacks access to green spaces. Allowing people to visit parks and recreational areas even during lockdown (as many cities have done), or starting initiatives that encourage citizens to take on outdoor sports or that makes it easier to visit the great outdoors, are simple yet effective activities that city authorities can do to improve the quality of life of its citizens.
With this in mind, I expect our view of regional hubs and smaller cities in the countryside to change, as improved quality of life becomes a factor when deciding on where to call home.
With broadband access already readily available in many regions, you don’t have to live in a metropolis in order to have a career there (as many people who escaped big cities during the pandemic have discovered). At the same time, there’s an ever-growing list of companies that will let people work from home forever.
Emphasizing the level of quality of life rather than the level of pay offers employers in non-metropolitan areas a reason to attract talent outside the city limits. If our view of long-distance travelling becomes something that is done primarily when we can’t substitute a physical interaction with a digital one, the local public transportation system becomes more important as well as the opportunity to go by bike or scooter whenever you long for freedom or want to keep a social distance.
I would also suggest that any attempt to make people live a more sustainable life should take the quality of life into consideration. Human self-interest is a powerful force of change and should be used whenever possible. Emphasizing how the proposed changes contribute to a higher quality of life, rather than a more sustainable way of life (even if that might be the case) is key.
3. The increasing importance of local
The casualties of the pandemic have been many and everywhere. Still, each one that died from covid-19 died somewhere and to the local community, the pandemic will inherently be a local experience.
Despite the pandemic being a global phenomenon, it never felt that way. To most people, the sudden lack of toilet paper on store shelves in March is likely to have been the first tangible effects of the anxiety that spread more rapidly than the number of cases at the time. That discovery took place somewhere, in my case at the local supermarket, and that transformed the pandemic from an abstract concept to the very tangible danger of not being able to get hold of toilet paper.
When I started to worry about how hospitals handled the sudden influx of covid-patients, I was only concerned about the hospitals closest to me, never any others. When we were asked to support the medical staff in helping them get protective gears or lunch boxes, I only cared for the local hospital.
And when the first calls to support businesses hit by community restrictions, it was always local businesses people talked about: restaurants, bookshops, cafés. No one ever asked me to support my local McDonalds or Starbucks during the pandemic. Being global brands, they will never feel as important as local businesses.
To the extent anyone still believed they were citizens of the world, that idea was likely to be one of the first casualties of the pandemic. The focus on how the pandemic affected one’s local community was intense. People who considered themselves “global nomads” were suddenly very interested in getting back home to their families or, at least, to familiar environments where they felt safer. There’s a reason we use the analogy of “growing up” like a planted seed is breaking the surface of the soil and reaching for the sky. Denying your connection to the place you grow up is denying your past. The more insecure the future looks, the stronger the allure of the past and the more important that connection gets.
When remote working was encouraged or made mandatory, a large group of office workers asked themselves where they wanted their home office to be situated. Why work from a tiny downtown apartment when you easily trade it for a house in a green suburb or an ever bigger house in the countryside? (Again, we need to remind ourselves that having these options is a privilege and many don’t have it.)
The internet connection is the same, but almost everything else about it provides a higher quality of life. With new abilities to get professional medical care on Facetime, studying at a university via Zoom or streaming an opera from the nearest opera house, even small villages are no longer as remote as they used to be. And because of this, living in bigger cities doesn’t feel as important as it used to be.
At the same time, villages and suburbs offer a sense of community a large city never can, which makes them even more attractive. There’s seldom locally food production in a city, but in the countryside, you might even get to know the farmer because he’s a local — just like you.
And in that identification as a local is perhaps the key to why local is becoming more important. It offers you an easy way to become someone, not just anyone. That’s why I believe location will become even more important to people in the future and why smart municipalities should stress the ability to experience a high quality of life in order to attract and retain citizens.
It’s not about the location itself, but about the life that location enables you to have, during 2021 and post-pandemic.
