In any event, many urban industries will never recover. Who knows what could set off a full-blown panic that pops the urban real estate bubble, and plunges us straight into the Great Corona Depression? House prices could crash, too: they’re already down in May in the UK by 0.2%, and we’re just getting started. New York has 550m sq metres of office space even a 10% drop would set off a shockwave. Soon enough, commercial real estate will tank. Home workers will shoulder the costs of home offices. We’ll all get lonelier and more depressed as a result, with lower productivity and fewer of the “weak ties” that social scientists say make cities productive.
With commuting even more miserable than before, more companies will follow Twitter in allowing their employees to work from home for ever. When it lifted in Wuhan, private car use nearly doubled. Air pollution is already nearly back to pre-Covid levels, and this is while most major cities remain in some form of lockdown. We’ll all drive everywhere, terrified, alone, worsening congestion and poisoning the air as we go. Thinkers such as Joel Kotkin have argued that car-oriented sprawl is not just a natural outcome of the pandemic, but an ideal model of safe and independent living. Transit ridership, already on the slow decline in the US, will plummet – not just out of fear, but because social distancing requirements mean metros can only handle about 15% of their previous riderships. The old Victorian prejudice that urban density is a hive of disease and immorality will reign once again.Ĭertainly, the fear of pestilence is already causing us to shun subways, thereby hurting a crucial mechanism that allows cities to thrive. As with the post-war “white flight” to the suburbs, the city centres will be abandoned by those with money, leaving them to crumble and reversing several decades of urban renewal. Many will be people of colour, whose vulnerability to the virus is already reflected in data showing that black people are dying at roughly twice the rate of white people. Those who cannot – people barely making ends meet on state benefits, or working service jobs that require them to be in place – will be forced to stay. Those who can will either work remotely from a second home, or sell up and move to the suburbs or beyond. The dystopian theory, as usual, is the grim one, where many people simply flee. Or, like my friend’s experience suggests, is the pandemic an opening, an invitation to do things differently, in all facets of urban life? Dystopia: hold on to your hat So what does that mean for city life, so truncated these past few months? Is the Covid-19 pandemic a death blow to our cities, a stake driven through the heart of our ideal of dense, communal urban living? If, as appears likely, we don’t get a vaccine that fixes Covid-19 at a stroke, we’ll likely be living with this virus in some time, as we do with influenza.
“The virus forced a real-life experiment that achieved in a month what I’d struggled to argue for 10 years,” he said. Then coronavirus struck, the entire medical profession adopted his ideas en masse, and my friend’s clinic is now considered cutting-edge.
His colleagues figured he was a dangerous maverick. Paradoxically, he said, this would actually mean more personal attention for patients, as doctors would be freed for the most urgent cases.
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