The Urban Challenge: Seven Ways COVID-19 Could Change Our Cities
Like in the past, cities have borne the major brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic because of population density and their connectivity to other urban centers. The crisis has also exposed some of the fundamental flaws in our urban public health systems, transportation, quality of governance and even growing inequalities.
According to World Resources Institute, governments around the world are faced with an enormous triple challenge right now: recovering from COVID-19, creating sustainable and inclusive development, and addressing the climate crisis. Seizing the Urban Opportunity, a new research by Coalition of Urban Transitions, shows that focusing on cities is key to overcoming these challenges while generating considerable economic, social and environmental benefits. The research focuses on six key countries which produce about a third of global GDP and 41% of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use and make up 42% of the world’s urban population. Consequently, the extent to which these six emerging economies can spur cities to catalyse sustainable, inclusive and resilient growth is crucial not only for their future, but for the entire world as well.
With experts warning that factors like climate change increasing the likelihood of pandemics in the future, there is an opportunity for urban planners here to plan for tomorrow.
Connected and smart
Even before the pandemic hit, the years were seeing an increasing interest in the use of smart solutions — sensors, connected ICT and big data analytics — for enhanced urban operations. Post COVID, the switch to work from home, online education and shopping, telemedicine, and surveillance systems for contact tracing have together give a fillip to smart city movement.
Real-time monitoring and Big Data analytics are critical for responding to disruptive events. Cities collect various types of data, including vehicular traffic, pedestrian movement, and air quality. In response to COVID-19, many cities are using such data to create dashboards that inform local authorities of changes in societal behaviors, allowing them to make data-driven and evidence-based adaptive decisions. Going forward, fusion of IoT sensors, smart city systems, real-time simulation with AI and machine learning can help develop processes based on metrics related to population, density, proximity, diversity and movements, to enable more entrepreneurial and high-performance cities.
Future of the office
With surveys showing that there are many takers for work-from-home even in a post-COVID world, the future of office may change permanently. Remote work is found to be beneficial for both employees and employers alike since it has been observed that on an average, employees generally put in more hours when working in their own space. Also, remote work means reduced real estate and logistical costs for companies.
According to JLL’s research on The Future of Global Office Demand, the rise of the hyperconnected city region will gradually shift the spatial pattern of office demand, pushing it toward a diverse office market ecosystem comprising three major elements:
· Rising demand in livable, well-connected suburbs and small cities
· A reimagined and increasingly multi-use urban core
· New clusters of innovation-based activities
The study forecasts that as the flexibility to work remotely is seamlessly integrated into working life, “a focus on well-being and some de-densification, along with improvements to design to encourage the interaction, are all elements which may change and that are likely to offset a decline in space as a result of increased homeworking”.
Rise of neighborhoods
The biggest change since the pandemic has been in the use of urban public spaces. How dependent are we on our immediate neighborhood? Can I buy what I need, or access services like health or amenities like playground around my home?
With WfH becoming an established norm, there will be a movement for more public services, restaurants, grocery stores, or parks nearer residential areas.
In the UK, there is an interesting movement called Playing Out which involves citizens pushing for making their streets, neighborhoods and cities more play and child-friendly — using the playing out model and many other creative and imaginative ways.
This may give rise to sustainable communities and also better, more flexible use of existing spaces — libraries or coffee shops becoming co-working spaces, or mixed use of office towers to include housing or childcare or shopping places.
Reclaiming the roads
In the recent times, roads have become synonymous with cars, with little attention paid to pedestrians or light traffic like bicycles. However, during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, many cities such as Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Brussels, Montreal, Calgary, Portland and Minneapolis, among others, temporarily stopped or limited access to vehicles on certain corridors in order to help walking, biking, and outdoor activities. Milan, Paris, Berlin, Bogota and Mexico City even expanded cycling network.
“We worked for years to reduce car use. If everybody drives a car, there is no space for people, there is no space to move, there is no space for commercial activities outside the shops… We think we have to reimagine Milan in the new situation. We have to get ready; that’s why it’s so important to defend even a part of the economy, to support bars, artisans and restaurants. When it is over, the cities that still have this kind of economy will have an advantage, and Milan wants to be in that category,” Marco Granelli, a deputy mayor of Milan, was quoted by Guardian.
More flexible public transit
The lifeline of cities are the transportation services, and in many shapes their characters. History is witness to how advances in transportation means and technologies — from horse-driven carriages to trams, trains to metros, cars and buses, flyovers and over-bridges — have led to expansion of cities, making it possible citizens to live and commute in new ways.
There are views that COVID-19 could sound the death-knell for urban public transit systems. And while it could still look like that in some of the most severely affected places — with public-transit ridership down 70–90% in the world’s major cities — but let’s accept it that it is practically impossible to expect everyone in a city to afford individual cars, nor is it a practical solution keeping in mind the roads or pollution factors.
A survey by McKinsey in September 2020 throws up some interesting facts — nearly 70% of mobility users in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and China said they would choose to walk or bike at least weekly even after returning to normal life (up six percentage points from precrisis levels). Likewise, private cars gained one percentage point (from 78% pre-crisis to 79% after returning to normal life). And, after intense drops in ridership, public transportation users will likely return to at least weekly usage, at around 40%. The survey show shared micro-mobility, e-hailing, and carsharing should all be slightly more popular, gaining 1–2% postcrisis when normal life returns.
We may see policies favoring low-emission vehicles, like the US, China or Germany has done with electric vehicles (EVs), while Italy launched a policy to offer its citizens a bonus of 500 euros for buying a bike.
Sustainable and future proof
The current crisis gives an opportunity to city planners to evaluate more effective land use, upgrade zoning and procurement policies to promote smart density and greener investment. In In 2019, 10,000+plus cities had made commitments to reduce their carbon emissions drastically by 2050, and as per a report released last year, use of existing technologies and policies could help the cities cut their carbon emissions by 90% by 2050.
Will the pandemic accelerate the shift towards that direction? As we rebuild for the future, there is a need to learn from the mistakes of the past, so that our future cities are not only resilient, sustainable and smarter, but also better prepared to handle crises.
