Article
Urban Link
Expert Voices 2021: What Will Be the "New Normal"?
January 21, 2021
Impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic are reverberating through cities around the world. Many cities have been hit hard. The response to the pandemic—the shuttering of physical gathering places and a doubling-down on technological stand-ins—has disrupted urban systems, distorted economies, and upended the lives of the over 4 billion people who live and work in cities worldwide. These impacts have been greatest on the most vulnerable: rates of extreme poverty are growing around the world and, here in the U.S., already disadvantaged communities face higher infection and mortality rates and rates of job loss.
There is no question that cities will change as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The question is: What will be the lasting effects of the pandemic on urban life and urban systems? Given these and the pandemic’s effects on vulnerable populations in cities, how do we rebuild equitably and sustainably?
These are the questions we asked of our respondents for Expert Voices, our annual e-newsletter for which we ask experts to reflect on a question of importance to cities. Their answers touch on a range of tactics and approaches, from policy proposals to broad attitudinal shifts.
One theme that underlies them all is the belief that cities are essential. While our experts are realistic about the many challenges that cities face, they are also confident that cities themselves—agglomerations of people and commerce, ideas and innovation—hold the keys to overcoming these challenges. Even those who foresee smaller cities in the future are confident that cities aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they are necessary for a better future. The ideas in these essays show the way.
—Eugénie Birch and Susan Wachter, Co-Directors, Penn IUR
Expert Voices 2021: What Will Be the "New Normal"?
Magnifying Glass, Trend Accelerator, and Catalyst for Change | Aziza Akhmouch
We Need a GI Bill for Equity | Angela Glover Blackwell
Better Than We Hope, Yet Worse Than We Fear | Lance Freeman
Design for Resilience and Adaptability | Hazem Galal
Will the Crisis Lead to Transportation Policy Reform? | Erick Guerra
Focus New and Increased Commitments on Broadly Shared Prosperity | Maurice A. Jones
Post-COVID-19 Cities, Their Spatial Structure and Inclusivity | Kyung-Hwan Kim
A Steely National Resolve Is Needed to Achieve an Equitable Recovery | Gerron Levi
Creating Forward-Looking Policies | Diana Lind
Growing Cultures of Trust | Randall Mason
An Opportunity to Rethink City Systems | Robert Muggah
An Equitable Pandemic Response and Recovery Will Shape the Next Chapter of Urban Development and World Peace | Victor Santiago Pineda
New York Will Rise Again | Emily Rafferty
A New Reality | Saskia Sassen
Turning Down the Temperature in Vulnerable Neighborhoods | Fritz Steiner
Revealing Exclusion of India’s Migrants | Tariq Thachil
Cities Will Adapt and National Economies that Nurture Cities Will Ascend | Richard Voith
Tackling Infrastructure and Livability Challenges | Sameh Wahba
Cities and States and Federal Policy | Tom Wright
Adjusting to the Pandemic Fallout | Mark Zandi
Magnifying Glass, Trend Accelerator, and Catalyst for Change
By Aziza Akhmouch
Pandemics have always triggered rethinking of urban paradigms, and COVID-19 is no exception. COVID-19 has acted as a magnifying glass, trend accelerator, and catalyst for change. Cities have always been places of creativity, experimentation, agility and innovation, and to ensure this will be the case again, we should draw lessons from at least three domains to go smart, green, and inclusive.
- First, the digital revolution, notably the large-scale teleworking experience, can minimize pressure on local services, land, housing prices, and natural resources. Going forward, we should revisit our relationship to time and chrono-urbanism to stop doing the same thing, at the same time, in the same place such as piling up in crowded transportation and traffic jams to start work at 9am.
- Second, the increased environmental awareness induced by the combined “Greta Effect” and the “Zoom Effect,” and the rediscovery of local loops and proximity, provide a unique opportunity to accelerate the ecological transition, which seems socially and politically more acceptable today than just a year ago.
- Third, the growing citizen discontent requires renewing the social contract to strengthen local governance. The crisis disproportionately impacted vulnerable populations such as women, youth, migrants, the homeless, and the elderly. Going forward, fixing the inequality issue will be the hot potato for city leaders. They should adapt urban design, reclaim public space, and ensure immediate access to amenities while securing safety and health for all their residents for better quality urbanization and greater territorial cohesion.
Aziza Akhmouch is the Head of the Cities, Urban Policies and Sustainable Development Division within the Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). She oversees a team of over 30 experts providing governments with new data, evidence, analysis and guidance in a wide range of urban policies to foster smart, inclusive, competitive and sustainable cities. For a full discussion of the themes in this essay, please see the OECD’s latest report.
We Need a GI Bill for Equity
By Angela Glover Blackwell
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly compromised the social and economic core of cities. The shuttering of offices has cut the volume of people traveling to business districts by over half, upending the economy of downtown commercial enterprises and service-oriented businesses, and decimating public transit. The subsequent layoffs have had a disproportionate effect on Black and brown workers, who hold the bulk of essential service jobs and are among the first to lose their jobs and the last to get them back. Black and Latinx women have been hit especially hard and now top the ranks of the unemployed.
Pathways to economic mobility for working-class people of color have been disrupted, and—as we witness the next wave of white flight in which many non-essential workers are moving to smaller towns, suburbs, and rural areas that are cheaper or perceived to offer a higher quality of life—cities can remain competitive by ensuring that those who remain have the resources they need to recover. This moment calls for a big, bold solution that solves with nuance and specificity for those who have been made most vulnerable, creating a cascading effect for the rest of society.
We need a GI Bill—which was responsible for the creation of the white middle class—for racial equity and inclusion. As this nation moves toward a demographic shift in which people of color will become the majority, a GI bill for racial equity and inclusion will ensure that we are not leaving behind those on whom our fate is dependent. A federal job guarantee, which would provide a quality publicly-financed job to everyone who wants one, is a transformative intervention that would not only achieve permanent full employment but unlock human potential and build strong, vibrant communities.
Angela Glover Blackwell is Founder in Residence at PolicyLink and a Penn IUR Fellow. She started PolicyLink in 1999 with a mission of advancing racial and economic equity for all. Prior to founding the organization, Blackwell served as Senior Vice President at the Rockefeller Foundation, where she oversaw the foundation’s Domestic and Cultural programs.
Better Than We Hope, Yet Worse Than We Fear
By Lance Freeman
For cities, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely be better than we hope, yet worse than we fear. Things will be better because COVID-19 will not spell the “death of the city.” Despite the most intense early outbreaks occurring in big cities like Wuhan and New York, later outbreaks in places like Arizona and South Dakota clearly demonstrate the vulnerability of urban, suburban, and rural spaces alike. This suggests there won't be a widespread flight from the city as many initially feared. Moreover, the past shows us that rampaging pandemics have never kept cities down for long. The value of proximity and face-to-face contact and all that brings is just too great to be eliminated by even something as threatening as a pandemic whether from COVID-19 or the plague.
Even the increased use of remote technology during the pandemic, which threatens the downtown skyscraper with superfluousness, has a silver lining for cities. Remote technology enables people to work and make social connections from almost anywhere. But people will translate these cyber connections into real flesh and blood connections, and cities are the best places for these online-to-real-life translations to take place. As an example, I’ve taken to using the online platform Zwift for stationary bike riding. Through Zwift, I’ve met numerous local riding partners, many of whom I hope to meet for real world rides when the pandemic subsides.
Cities will thus continue to be attractive to those who utilize remote technology to work and play from home—the young, affluent and educated. Employers in the knowledge economy will also continue to be drawn to cities to tap their most important raw material, these same young and educated professionals.
But cities will likely be worse off in at least one important way. Someone has to keep cities humming for the legions of young, educated types that will continue to flock there. It is the gig-economy workers, low-paid service workers and other poorly remunerated workers that keeps cities thriving and are “essential workers” in the midst of our current crisis. Here we see worsening of trends in inequality accelerating in the wake of the pandemic.
After solving the public health emergency the challenge will be to solve the problem of inequality that will continue to plague our cities.
Lance Freeman is a Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP, Provost's Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the Weitzman School of Design, and Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Governance Studies Program at The Brookings Institution. His research focuses on affordable housing, gentrification, ethnic and racial stratification in housing markets, and the relationship between the built environment and well-being.
Design for Resilience and Adaptability
By Hazem Galal
Urbanization is inevitable. Higher urban density makes cities the engines of economic growth and innovation but also makes them more vulnerable to shocks. Many cities are travel hubs with heavy reliance on public transport and the rapid urbanization surges have resulted in cities becoming more densely packed. Cities have been at the forefront of COVID-19. While some cities have demonstrated their resilience, many cities were caught off-guard and their responses to the pandemic have not measured up to the challenge. Cities that have invested in developing capabilities to deal with all stages of the threat cycle—sense, defend, respond, and recover—have demonstrated their resilience in dealing with the socioeconomic effects of the pandemic. Cities should adopt an integrated approach, working with all stakeholders to enhance their preparedness for future shocks.
Transformative, new ways to build back better are essential for cities in a post-pandemic world. Many cities are at the cusp of major transformation which, if managed well, funded innovatively, and enabled by technology, could lead to unprecedented economic prosperity and livability for all—or could drive them to social decline, economic collapse, and environmental damage. COVID-19 presents a unique opportunity for cities to learn from their experience in combatting the virus to be better prepared for future emergencies. The pandemic’s unprecedented impact on every aspect of urban life has provided compelling data and information about how to improve crisis responses and recovery strategies. In a post-pandemic world, digital transformation will impact how city residents work, learn, entertain themselves, and commute. Cities will need to have maximum interconnectivity to flex swiftly between purely digital and hybrid modes. Buildings and public spaces will need to be designed with multipurpose uses in mind. More than ever, our cities need to be better designed for resilience and adaptability.
Hazem Galal is Cities and Local Government Global Leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). He has expertise in strategy formulation and implementation for cities and local government entities, including smart cities.
Will the Crisis Lead to Transportation Policy Reform?
By Erick Guerra
The pandemic has disrupted travel patterns and will have notable effects on urban transportation systems for years to come. The longest-lasting effects, however, will largely depend on whether the crisis provides enough of a shock for policymakers to reform transportation policy. The pandemic almost certainly contributed to California’s recent executive order to phase out the sale of all but zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. The pandemic also presents an opportunity for state and federal governments to reconsider the half-century-old way that transportation dollars are raised and spent. Transportation finance mechanisms impede efforts to tackle climate change, reduce environmental injustices, and promote investment-led economic growth.
Consumers currently purchase gasoline to power their cars, trucks, and other vehicles. State and federal governments tax these sales and use the revenues to fund transportation investments and maintenance. As the vehicle fleet has become more fuel-efficient and policymakers have failed to peg taxes to inflation, this system has been slowly unraveling. Clearly, California will have to have moved away from the gas tax by 2035 if it hopes to maintain its existing network of roads, bridges, and transit. The pandemic, which substantially reduced driving and gas tax revenues in early months, has created substantial transportation budget shortages for state and federal transportation agencies. These funding shortages, though much discussed, are not the primary issue.
Resulting concerns over agency revenues and budgets highlight the primary issue: an institutional misalignment between transportation agencies’ missions and revenue streams. For all the stated emphasis on making the transportation network safer, more conservative, and less damaging to the environment, state and federal agencies have a strong incentive to encourage people to drive. The amount people drive directly determines transportation agencies’ budgets, influence, staffing, and capacity.
The second major issue is that the current financing system also does not do enough to address either the quality or quantity of transportation investments. Agencies prioritize projects based on political horse-trading and obscure formulas with little thought into whether the benefits of transportation investments outweigh the costs. The worst investments, like Alaska’s infamous and unbuilt bridge to nowhere, make the popular press. The rest are ignored or even hailed as positive investments in future growth and prosperity. Revenues are spent until depleted and there is no consideration of whether there might be too much infrastructure.
Third and finally, transportation policy creates substantial economic, environmental, and social harm, for which drivers do not pay. Transportation economists, planners, and engineers have long argued that driving is underpriced. Instead of investing gas tax revenues to offset harm, however, transportation agencies put most of the money back into the transportation system, further reducing the cost of driving and encouraging more driving. The places with the most driving generate the most revenue and invest the most in new infrastructure, often with small economic benefits relative to costs.
Yet the residents of urban areas with the most roadway per capita are generally the poorest, spend the most on transportation, have the highest likelihood of dying in a traffic collision, and generate the most transportation-related global and local pollution. Until policymakers can disconnect transportation spending from the amount driven and more carefully manage the quality and quantity of new investments, these relationships are unlikely to change.
Erick Guerra is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning in the Weitzman School of Design and a Penn IUR Faculty Fellow. His work focuses on relationships between land use, transportation systems, and travel behavior with an emphasis on rapidly motorizing cities, public health, and transportation technologies.
Focus New and Increased Commitments on Broadly Shared Prosperity
By Maurice A. Jones
It is difficult to speculate with confidence regarding the lasting effects of the pandemic on urban life and urban systems. Indeed, the legacy of the pandemic will probably depend on the choices we make over the course of the next couple of years or so. Certainly, we’ve seen staggering rates of hunger and housing insecurity, especially among BIPOC households. Small businesses, especially those owned by entrepreneurs of color and women, are in the midst of existential challenges.
What we do know is that remote work in some form isn’t going away; we will more than likely see fewer people, especially higher-income workers, going into offices to perform their work every day. Additionally, more and more small businesses are going to have to continue delivering services via technology and mobile solutions. These dynamics can have powerful and dramatic implications for urban systems moving forward.
In 2020, more organizations and more people stepped up and committed to advancing equitable and sustainable development, including contributing to LISC’s Project 10X.
My hope is that this spirit and this commitment becomes a lasting impact of the pandemic. The way we rebuild equitably and sustainably is to take these new and increased commitments and focus them on those people and places who will need access to technology and to small business e-commerce, so as to avoid increasing the gap between haves and have-nots in this new world. We need to strive to use these increased commitments to be intentional in rebuilding, so that prosperity flowing from these technological and system changes is broadly shared.
Maurice A. Jones is President and CEO of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), one of the country’s largest organizations supporting projects to revitalize communities and catalyze economic opportunity for residents. Prior to joining LISC, he was the Secretary of Commerce and Trade for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Post-COVID-19 Cities, Their Spatial Structure and Inclusivity
By Kyung-Hwan Kim
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way people work, shop, move, learn, and interact with others. The pandemic also provokes the fundamental question about the nature of cities and the importance of locations within cities. The defining characteristic of the city is high density; the benefits of living, working, and doing business originate from proximity to others that lower the cost of production, consumption, and social interaction. However, the experiences with the new lifestyles and business practices that evolved during the pandemic demonstrated that much can be achieved online without physical contacts, albeit with some deficiencies. This means that at least some of the changes will have an enduring effect on how cities operate even after the pandemic is over. On the other hand, high density and crowdedness in cities exposed urban residents to greater risks from transmittable diseases. The efforts to contain transmission of the virus resulted in social distancing and lockdowns, thereby creating physical distance between people. The potential threat of similar pandemics going forward will encourage people to avoid unwarranted proximity to others.
The legacy of COVID-19 may impact the spatial structure of cities. Remote working will remain popular to some workers and their employers, which will decrease the need for commercial space in central locations and increase demand for housing space. As the office and commercial space in central city areas decreases and a substantial share of the workforce opts for telecommuting, central locations will become less valuable. And, as people use their homes also as offices, and accordingly require larger floor space, suburban locations will become more attractive. In theory, the consequent flight to suburbs may take place in some American cities with low-density suburbs, but it is much less likely in Asian cities in which high density development extends to their outskirts.
The transition to a new normal may exacerbate inequality in various dimensions and make inclusivity of cities more important. The recovery of the urban economy is likely to be uneven across sectors and will put low-skilled workers and small-scale service providers at a disadvantage. Public transit ridership may fall as people try to stay away from crowds, which may decrease the quality of service and affect the mobility of moderate and low-income workers. The changes brought about during the pandemic are likely to expediate digital transformation and its incidence will vary across the segments of urban population. Remote working favors high-skilled white-collar workers with better facilities at home; online education favors students with more affluent and educated parents. Efforts should be made to address the issues of inequity.
Kyung-Hwan Kim is a Professor of Economics at Sogang University and a Penn IUR Scholar. He is a former vice minister of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport of the Republic of Korea (May 2015- June 2017).
A Steely National Resolve Is Needed to Achieve an Equitable Recovery
By Gerron Levi
Rebuilding vulnerable communities reeling from the economic ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic will require a heightened public-private partnership—one defined not just by resolute individual and entrepreneurial initiative, social enterprise, and nonprofit capacity-building, but also by thoughtful and visionary public policy re-envisioned with these communities in mind. The first step has to continue to focus on preservation—keeping homeowners and renters in their homes and surviving small and minority businesses open, and ensuring commercial corridors and office parks in thousands of lower-income neighborhoods across the country do not gradually succumb to the financial stress brought on by the pandemic. Despite extraordinary COVID-19 relief efforts by federal and state leaders, more targeted relief will be needed for the low- and moderate-income and minority neighborhoods most impacted by the pandemic.
Second, policies designed to corral private capital in support of key public policy objectives must be enhanced to ensure an equitable recovery. As a start, the nation should extend the reach and efficacy of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), focus on policies at the federal and local level that remove barriers to affordable housing production, and rehabilitate and re-tool Opportunity Zones to ensure equitable outcomes.
Finally, there has to be a laser-like focus on closing the racial wealth gap—a feat made much harder by the uneven impact of the pandemic. A housing finance system focused on increasing Black homeownership that is sustainable and improving housing equity is key, as is improving access to smaller dollar credit and technical assistance for minority business owners, including start-ups. More difficult is to increase the opportunities for minorities to save and invest, hold and benefit from higher-yielding capital assets, as well.
The nation has to be deliberate in its focus on an equitable recovery for vulnerable communities—it simply will not happen on its own.
Gerron Levi is Senior Director, Government Affairs, at National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC). She represented district 23A in the Maryland House of Delegates from 2007-2011, where she authored laws on education, crime, and ex-offender reentry.
Creating Forward-Looking Policies
By Diana Lind
Nearly one year into the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset in the United States, many of the economic drivers in cities, such as office workers, tourism, hospitality, higher education, and retail, have been forever changed. There will come a day when people go back to their offices, but not five days a week, 52 weeks per year. Stores and restaurants will reopen in cities, but an increasing percentage of their commerce will be transacted online. As we begin to acknowledge that we cannot simply try to recreate pre-pandemic life, we must also create forward-looking policies that build back a more socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable society.
We should formalize the flexibility that has allowed retail and restaurants to expand their footprint onto the sidewalk and into parking lanes. We should embrace how remote work will enable fewer car trips into city centers, and focus on how to support a greater array of neighborhoods that can support local retail and residential density. Under-utilized downtown commercial buildings should be repurposed as housing and social infrastructure, such as daycares, libraries, and homeless shelters, transforming those neighborhoods into more economically diverse ones. As much as the cityscape will need reinvention, so will city budgets and the delivery of city government services. As cities tested out free transit during COVID-19, they should consider it as a longer-term policy to address poverty. If the challenges presented by the pandemic are sincerely viewed as opportunities to correct outdated policies, we can hope that cities will end this decade in better shape than they were in before 2020.
Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. She currently leads the Arts + Business Council for Greater Philadelphia, where her work fosters an exchange between the creative and business communities. Her book, Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing (Bold Type Books), was published in October 2020.
Growing Cultures of Trust
By Randall Mason
The multiple crises and stresses of the current moment—pandemic, economic, political, and cultural—have reinforced the important role trust plays in urban life and urban systems.
As a factor in design, planning and preservation processes, trust is a key ingredient of civic infrastructure. Civic infrastructure enables and supports the multiple, overlapping, often disconnected systems of urban governance that characterize most cities—zoning, economic development, urban design, historic preservation, environmental conservation, and more. Trust is like the air these governance processes need to breathe. To restore them to health post-pandemic, repair of underlying cultures of trust is a precondition.
Over the past few years I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the (lack of) trust in many of the projects and places I’ve been working. If we don’t trust one another’s accounts of what the problem is; if we don’t trust anyone to speak with veracity in voicing their account as a stakeholder in a decision; if we categorically distrust institutions, our systems will continue to unravel and fragment.
Trust is built on experience, and past experiences enable expectations of trust. In other words, the past matters a lot in calculations of trust. Cautions abound; we shouldn’t be Pollyannas about trust. History teaches that trust has never been equally shared or distributed in the U.S. The historic preservation field is coming around to center on the discriminations, exclusions, and violence that mark histories of the American landscape. Those histories, and the current moment, show us there are a lot of instances when it’s very wise to not trust—when someone threatens us with violence or refuses to commit to any trustful relationship. Still, we need to grow cultures of trust in order to reconstitute a civic infrastructure that enables the technical, political, and urbanistic work of repair.
Randall Mason is Associate Professor of Historic Preservation in the Weitzman School of Design and a Penn IUR Faculty Fellow. His research interests include theory and methods of preservation planning, cultural policy, the economics of preservation, historic site management, the history and design of memorials, and the history of historic preservation.
An Opportunity to Rethink City Systems
By Robert Muggah
The COVID-19 pandemic could give rise to positive innovations in cities and a radical intolerance of the status quo. The 2020 pandemic does not spell the end of cities. To the contrary. Historically, disease outbreaks have contributed to design improvements in urban living. The bubonic plague in the 14th century resulted in prohibitions on squalid urban spaces. Malaria and cholera outbreaks in the 19th century triggered upgrades to ventilation and sewage systems. In the 20th century, typhoid, polio, and flu pandemics resulted in reforms to zoning, waste management, and the built environment. The same is true of COVID-19. Faced with wrenching revenue shortfalls and extensive liabilities, city councils will need to do more with less. At the same time, polls indicate that urbanites do not want a return to the “old normal,” the world of long commutes, crammed offices, and indoor existence. Notwithstanding the grim toll of the pandemic on population health and urban economies, it also provides an opening for city leaders and residents to genuinely build back better.
The COVID-19 pandemic opens up an opportunity for city leaders and civic entrepreneurs to rethink many aspects of city systems and the principles that underpin them. City executives from Amsterdam and Bristol to Los Angeles and Melbourne are focusing on ways to build healthier, digital and green cities that prioritize circular economics, micro-mobility, renewable energy, and more inclusive public spaces. Ideas like the 15-minute city or 20-minute neighborhood and circular and regenerative urban economics are going mainstream. The massive shift toward e-services, e-commerce, and digital connectivity are redefining what resilience means in the 21st century. And if COVID-19 has taught city dwellers anything, it is that this pandemic is a dress rehearsal for the most urgent crisis of all—climate change. Mayors and managers understand the need to accelerate the transition to sustainability which explains why over 10,500 cities have signed up to ambitious renewable energy commitments. They know that the most livable cities of the future will be carbon neutral.
Robert Muggah is the co-founder of the SecDev Group and Igarape Institute. He is known for his work on urbanization, security, migration, and new technologies. His latest book, Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years, was released in 2020 with Penguin/Random House.
An Equitable Pandemic Response and Recovery Will Shape the Next Chapter of Urban Development and World Peace
By Victor Santiago Pineda
Crises amplify what we already know and impel us to act. The COVID-19 pandemic is a catalyst for a new urban future. Urban life and urban systems have been forced to transform. We have new protocols in public health, city services, education, and work that have unequally burdened the livelihoods and wellbeing of millions that live on the margins. The vulnerability and resilience of our urban systems have exposed some of the deep structural inequalities in our society and highlighted the challenges inherent in battling global emergencies in local environments.
One of the lasting consequences of the pandemic will be a clearer understanding of the role that increasing urbanization trends play in exacerbating a range of issues that span public health, communications, accessibility, and human rights. In many cases, the sweeping containment measures designed to keep people safe have resulted in worsening the mental and physical wellbeing of millions of citizens around the world.
City leaders face immense pressure to recover quickly and stave off an impending economic downturn that the health crisis and poor policies have caused. An effective response by national and local governments is contingent on cross-agency coordination at the local level. A coordinated utilization of cities’ entire social, digital, and physical infrastructure allows urban planners, development practitioners, the tech industry, and scientists to contribute to emerging pain points. Digital and physical accessibility form part of these local and national recovery plans.
Well-planned cities leverage new technologies and principles of universal design to improve the social and economic outcomes of all individuals dramatically.
City leaders need to rapidly implement new standards for equity, privacy, and security while deploying technologies based on human rights, equity, and accessibility. Evidence-based urban policy should be based on reliable, disaggregated datasets that consider disability, aging, and the diversity of human experiences within cities. There are many success stories in this regard, with cities developing a holistic pandemic response that considers all citizens in their recovery.
In addition to ensuring the ongoing provision of essential services, financial assistance services in cities like Sao Paolo, Chicago, and Los Angeles have been provided across a range of areas, including relief from government fees and loans and financial help for communities and those in need. Workforce development services have also been offered in the form of strategic services for businesses and programs to help develop the skills of workers of all ages, genders, and abilities to improve their career prospects.
It is precisely this type of multi-faceted, and in some cases, coordinated policy that is most effective. By taking these kinds of approaches, city leaders can recover and redirect urban systems towards a more equitable future.
Urbanization will only intensify, and cities will continue to thrive, but only when and only if they provide transformational change opportunities for those who need them most. By improving social infrastructure, mobility, and access to services, we can improve the livelihoods of all. Consider joining our Cities for All Community and learn more on how to build back better with the Cities4All learning modules.
Victor Santiago Pineda is Lecturer, Department of City and Regional Planning, and Director, Inclusive Cities Lab at University of California Berkeley. He is a social impact entrepreneur, globally recognized human rights expert, and leading scholar on inclusive and accessible smart cities.
New York Will Rise Again
By Emily Rafferty
Though I have been long steeped in New York City’s tourism, cultural, economic, and political life, it is difficult to opine so soon on the lasting effects of a worldwide pandemic, alongside the aftershocks of the horrific siege on the U.S. Capitol.
It was only 11 months ago that New York began the year with throngs of tourists, offering hopes of growing our record-breaking 67 million visitors of 2019. They were filling our hotels, relishing our restaurants, and thronging Broadway and cultural institutions. Crime was at an all-time low and the economy was strong. However, many of us knew we faced a day of reckoning on homelessness, education, infrastructure, and unemployment, among other festering issues. Then came COVID-19.
Still, I am optimistic that New York will rise again. Assuming a successful vaccine, we should see tourism, a robust national and international economic driver, recover within two to four years. After all, New York has reinvented itself time and again. We will emerge changed, with the New York of the future likely to be cleaner and greener, and include new modes of transportation, mixed office and living environments, the repurposing of commercial real estate, new ways to showcase the city’s cultural energy, and a blend of virtual and real-time for all kinds of endeavors.
We will need to be ever mindful of the lessons learned from the inequities we witnessed in the handling of the pandemic and the emergence and importance of the Black Lives Matter movement. It will require laser focus on reform in our approach to jobs, economic resilience, affordable housing, educational excellence, cultural vibrancy, and so much more. Our revival must be more inclusive—and more durable—than ever.
Emily Rafferty is President Emerita of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and served as Chairman of the Board of NYC & Company from 2008 to 2020 where she continues to serve on the Executive Committee. She thanks Fred Dixon, President & CEO of NYC & Company; Donna Keren, NYC & Company Research & Insights; and Harold Holzer, author and historian, for their input on this essay.
A New Reality
By Saskia Sassen
In today’s world we confront a new reality at ground level. Historically, ground-level interventions have often been pushed aside by other promises, experiments, options. Not today: we have now refocused many of our urban efforts onto “the virus.” This has meant avoiding contact in cities where contact is in many ways the essence of urbanity. In its own micro version we could argue that the virus wants both the capacity to grab something from our bodies and the capacity to avoid contact.
Cities have become epicenters for this new crisis—not by magical innovations but very simply by being sites for the concentration of us humans. It does inevitably confront us with the brutal reality that the virus wants specific items from our blood stream. We cannot escape this fact. It is the shaper of a new reality.
Perhaps inevitably the focus shifts from viruses and people to the city: how city leaders have reacted to the crisis, prepared for novel attacks, managed to persuade residents to respect the warnings.
And cities themselves have reacted to the virus in a vast range of ways. The overall effect has mostly signaled the limits of what we can do. And this is a serious alert, a call to invite residents to become active players in the drama that is developing.
But what are the options we the citizens can deploy under current circumstances? There are probably many—but mostly partial and not enough to make a difference.
This leaves us, the citizens, with a somewhat terrifying recognition that there is not much we can do.
It is also a call for mobilizing and connecting with others—and recognizing that if we work with neighbors, passersby, cleaners, the homeless, and more, we can launch initiatives and enable those variously impaired to become active.
We might ask “Where does this all take us?” It takes us to a first step, and only that, of a new kind of emergent battle that is likely to become more and more present in our lives. When the next virus appears we will be more prepared.
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, a Member of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired until 2015, and a Penn IUR Scholar. She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy; inequality, gendering, and digitization are three key variables running though her work.
Turning Down the Temperature in Vulnerable Neighborhoods
By Fritz Steiner
The pandemic has shined a bright light on the inequalities in American society, and they are especially evident in cities. The most vulnerable among us—Black, brown, and older Americans—have experienced COVID-19 infections and deaths at disproportionately higher rates. Minority and poor women worked longer hours and/or experienced more job losses while struggling to help with their children’s formal education.
One possible lasting effect is that we can learn from this experience to protect the most vulnerable populations in the future catastrophes that are certain to come. The overarching threat of our time is climate change. Along with more hurricanes and wildfires, among other effects, a warmer planet will likely facilitate the spread of viruses.
How might we redesign our cities to mitigate and adapt to climate change? Let us focus on one example. As a result of redlining and other racist practices, Black neighborhoods in the United States generally have less tree canopy than white communities have. The lack of trees, coupled with seas of asphalt, contributes to urban heat islands. As the planet warms, these heat islands become more dangerous, adding to existing health risks and reducing quality of life.
We should redesign urban heat island areas with more trees and less asphalt. We should plant more street trees and turn parking lots into neighborhood parks. In doing so, the health and welfare of vulnerable populations will be improved. In Philadelphia, WRT’s GreenPlan Philadelphia created a roadmap for this work that other cities could emulate.
Frederick (Fritz) Steiner is Dean, Paley Professor, and Co-Executive Director of The McHarg Center, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and a Penn IUR Faculty Fellow. Previously, he served as Dean of the School of Architecture and Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin for 15 years.
Revealing Exclusion of India’s Migrants
By Tariq Thachil
This broad question can only be answered with reference to specific local and regional experiences of the pandemic. In India, the country whose urban spaces I study, the lasting legacy of the pandemic will be in brutally revealing how exclusionary our cities remain. In late March 2020, newspapers across the world were filled with heartbreaking images of rural migrants in India risking, and sometimes losing, their lives to flee the cities in which they work. This “migrant crisis” was precipitated by the sudden imposition of a stringent national lockdown by the Indian government in response to the pandemic. The exodus was very clearly completely unanticipated by policymakers, whose subsequent actions oscillated between coercive efforts to keep migrants within cities and emergency measures to get them home. Headlines across India repeated several questions: Who were these migrants? What were they doing in cities? And why would they undertake such treacherous journeys?
I have worked closely with the communities at the center of this storm. They are “circular” migrants, who do not permanently relocate to the city. Instead, they circulate several times a year between the cities where they work and the villages in which their families remain. Almost all are informally employed, largely as manual daily wage laborers on construction sites. The lockdown order abruptly ended migrants’ abilities to earn—their reason for being in cities. Finally, urban policy in India is notoriously exclusionary towards circular migrants. Most are unable to avail of important government benefits, or easily find affordable short-term housing. Their vulnerabilities also render them easy and frequent targets of repressive urban policing, often at the behest of suspicious urban natives.
In short, the migrant exodus was far from an “irrational panic,” as some government actors concluded. Instead, they reflect the harsh conditions of their urban lives: bereft of family, secure wages, or safety nets. The crisis will stand as testimony to the longstanding neglect of these populations, who number in the tens of millions, in formulating urban policy. The much-trumpeted promise of India’s cities as engines of development must be muted until they are made more accommodative of those who build them.
Tariq Thachil is Director of Penn’s Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI), and Associate Professor of Political Science and Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on political parties and political behavior, identity politics, urbanization and migration, with a regional focus on South Asia.
Cities Will Adapt and National Economies that Nurture Cities Will Ascend
By Richard Voith
Globally, urbanization has been the path out of subsistence for billions of people over the course of human history. This is not to diminish the crucial role of agriculture and rural life, but rather to recognize that thriving cities are essential to innovation, which is crucial to the planet’s future. The COVID-19 pandemic and the remote-work technologies that have enabled the continued productive functioning of economies has resulted in dire predictions about the viability of cities in the future. The most likely outcome, in my view, is that cities will adapt, and that national economies that nurture cities will ascend.
Cities have confronted natural and manmade challenges such as the Spanish flu in 1918, the ascendance of automobiles in the 1950s through the 1970s and the internet revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. Cities have recovered and prospered. The successful use of Zoom and Microsoft Teams has led many to say “this time is different,” because the technologies can enable the economy to function without gathering together physically. The dual challenge of the COVID pandemic and widespread acceptance of technologies supporting remote work certainly poses a new serious challenge for cities.
The most obvious and disturbing urban outcomes of COVID-19 thus far are the households in financial distress, the empty downtown office buildings, empty transit, and the closed shops that formerly served people in the offices. What does the future hold? To answer that question, one must ask what roles did cities really play prior to COVID-19 and post COVID-19, how will cities’ abilities to fulfill those roles change?
Increasingly, cities are the primary sources of interaction among diverse people, opinions, and economic realities. They are civilizing, stabilizing forces. These interactions are productive forces for innovation and wealth generation.
The true value added by cities is not replaced by video conferencing platforms. The key functions of cities are not satisfied by these technologies and these technologies can, in the wrong circumstances, dramatically undermine these social functions (that can only be provided by cities) by reinforcing social segregation and segmentation. Sorting into homogeneous, Tiebout-like virtual communities is a natural extension of voting with one’s feet. Increasingly efficient sorting will result in continued erosion of common ground, making it increasingly difficult to generate the agreement among communities necessary to solve challenges that are larger than tribal.
On the plus side, once COVID-19 is defeated, these communications technologies offer real solutions to some problems challenging the cities. In particular, infrastructure has always been a constraint on city productivity which is very expensive to overcome. Congestion limits the amount of economic activity that can be generated by firms located in the city, and, therefore, the amount of income that households can earn. The new technologies are one means to increase the amount of economic activity supported by city infrastructure at relatively low costs.
Of course, there will be a challenging period of adjustment. Increasingly, cities will have to be places where people want to live and work. More firms will have to be attracted to fill existing spaces. Households will be looking for somewhat larger spaces than is typical now in cities to support work from home. Public transit providers, which will be crucial in any successful city recovery effort, will have to tailor products and pricing to households that travel for work less frequently but have more need for travel at other times of the day
U.S. urban policy needs a national discussion centering around the support of equity and opportunity, including the support of secondary education whose investment returns are not necessarily local, but benefit the nation as a whole. In addition, we need to realize that urban, suburban, and rural economic health and social wellbeing are inexorably linked. We need politics of inclusion which can only happen through interaction among communities.
Richard Voith is a Founding Principal of Econsult Solutions, Inc. and a Penn IUR Faculty Fellow. He is known for his expertise in real estate economics, transportation, and applied microeconomics.
Tackling Infrastructure and Livability Challenges
By Sameh Wahba
What will be the lasting effects of the pandemic on urban life and urban systems?
Cities in developing countries have been particularly hard-hit by COVID-19. The pandemic underscored the stark inequities that exist in cities and exposed the differences between the places with a livable density for their population versus those suffering from overcrowding, mostly in slums and informal settlements. As such, it is important for national and local governments to prioritize investing in infrastructure and improving living conditions in the most deprived places.
The pandemic has also accelerated the trend of work from home and by now a significant population in many countries is working from home; this trend is not expected to completely reverse after the vaccine has been deployed. As a result, demand for office space will likely remain somewhat depressed in the short term, with businesses seeking less office space with more flexible lease terms. The demand for office space is expected to rebound in the long run, though with different work space including more focus on urban regeneration and the development of mixed-use and co-working spaces.
Ultimately, if fewer people need to live close to work, then what will really attract them to live in cities will be the amenities such as the parks, public spaces and cultural facilities, the quality of education and services, the diversity, and overall quality of life and livability. That is why it will be critical for cities to rethink land use and mobility and emphasize livability aspects including how to avert congestion and pollution. Emphasizing alternative modes of transportation especially non-motorized transport such as walking and cycling and bringing day-to-day activities in closer proximity to people and where they live—what is at the heart of the “15-minute city” model that Paris and other cities are adopting, and which in many ways is a return to the age-old concept of the neighborhood planning unit. Many cities including Chennai, which added 100 km of bicycle lanes, or Jakarta, which has implemented car-free days and pop-up cycle lanes, are also adapting their planning towards more pedestrian-friendly and livable cities.
Given these and the pandemic’s effects on vulnerable populations in cities, how do we rebuild equitably and sustainably?
Cities are at the frontline of the COVID-19 response. They find themselves having to double down on the pandemic response of reducing the virus’s spread and caring for the poor and vulnerable, continue to deliver essential services (often at higher costs given increased public health standards), plan for early recovery, and prepare for a new normal. This is taking place all the while their municipal finances are expected to drop with the contraction in economic activities.
The starting point for an equitable and sustainable rebuilding and recovery process is for cities, with the support of national governments, to tackle the infrastructure and livability challenges in the unserviced and underserviced neighborhoods, especially slums and informal settlements. Regularizing land and property tenure is the key first step to improving living conditions in informal settlements and unlocking households’ investments in housing improvement. Then improvement to water and sanitation, and flood protection are key to improving the living conditions of the poor.
Housing affordability will remain key to livability and an inclusive and sustainable recovery, especially to enable cities to retain their essential workers. The pandemic has shown how there is a permanent need for essential workers in cities whose jobs do not lend themselves to remote working, whether these are nurses and medical professionals, police, janitors, waste collection workers, service staff in the food and beverage industry, or teachers. These workers will continue to need affordable housing in the vicinity of where they work.
Sameh Wahba is the Global Director for the World Bank’s Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice, based in Washington, D.C., and a Penn IUR Fellow. The Global Practice, which also covers territorial development, geospatial and results-based-financing issues, has a portfolio of close to $30bn in commitments in investment project, program-for-results and development policy lending and about 450 staff.
Cities and States and Federal Policy
By Tom Wright
COVID-19 hit cities in deeply unequal ways, exacerbating existing inequalities and accelerating trends that were already underway, such as remote learning or telecommuting.
In New York, it also came after a generation of extraordinary growth, which was only temporarily slowed by 9/11, the financial crisis, and SuperStorm Sandy. Just as COVID preyed on communities which were suffering before 2020—communities of color and poverty, the elderly and people living on the margins—the recovery is going to primarily benefit those who need it the least. The tech industry is poised to claim a growing share of the city’s commercial and residential real estate, and the upcoming fiscal crisis will make it extremely hard to enact progressive policies at the municipal or state level to combat rising inequality. So the lasting effect of the pandemic will be to take trends which were going to play out gradually over a decade or longer and accelerate them, with all the disruption that entails.
There’s a great deal of consensus about the planning policies that cities will need to recover: building more housing and breaking down economic and racial barriers between communities; maintaining and expanding public transit while repurposing streets to a wider range of activities and modes; supporting local retail and public spaces. The biggest challenges will be increasingly outside the purview of cities and states, and involve federal policies to reduce economic inequality and remove carbon from our economy. Unfortunately, there is still little national consensus around federal support. In addition to COVID-19, 2020 also saw the rise of both Black Lives Matter and calls for greater racial justice—and enduring Trumpism and nascent fascism. Which of these movements triumphs nationally will go a long way to determining the success or failure of American cities.
Tom Wright is President of Regional Plan Association, an independent urban planning think tank focused on improving the prosperity, infrastructure, sustainability and quality of life of the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan region.
Adjusting to the Pandemic Fallout
By Mark Zandi
The COVID-19 pandemic has diminished the economic prospects of the nation’s large global gateway cities. These urban areas will continue to grow, and even flourish after the pandemic is over, but their economies will not be as vibrant as they would have been if not for the pandemic.
This goes in part to the fallout of the pandemic on global commerce, investment, and immigration which will take time to fully revive as the virus will be difficult to suppress in many parts of the world. And global business travel will be impaired as businesses have aggressively adopted new forms of communication that are much more cost-effective than hopping on a plane.
Most significantly, however, is the explosive growth in the work-from-anywhere phenomena. This is a fundamental shift in the way we live and work that has been supercharged by our adaptation to the pandemic. Zoom and similar technologies have empowered many that previously worked in large office towers in urban centers to live and work where they are most comfortable. Businesses have quickly embraced this as it reduces their costs as their employees move to places that are more affordable with lower taxes. To be sure, there are some adjustment costs and companies will still need to have a physical presence, but not nearly the presence they had, and perhaps not even in urban centers.
A decade from now, when we look back, we will see that GDP, employment, and incomes in most of our big cities grew at a slower rate than in the decade prior to the pandemic. The sooner cities grasp this reality and adjust to it, the more gracefully that adjustment will be.
Mark Zandi is Chief Economist of Moody’s Analytics, where he directs economic research, and a Penn IUR Fellow. His research interests encompass macroeconomics, financial markets, and public policy.
