The road less travelled
Edition 16. What does the future of cities look like? Will soft drinks cost more because we are not driving?
Deyan Sudjic writes this beautiful passage in his book - The Langauge of Cities -
A city without people is a dead city. A living city is the embodiment of the people who inhabit it. They fill its streets and its public spaces; they pour in every day to find all that a city has to offer. Crowds come to work or to study. They come to a city to be healed or to be entertained. A city can provide solace and companionship. Some, in the crowds that a city generates, use it as a place to transgress in the pursuit of pleasure or profit. Others use the crowd as an escape from isolation or the sense of their own insignificance.
The cities of the world are sick. As the coronavirus has raged globally, it is the city dwellers who have borne the disproportionate brunt. Many cities have not been designed with human health at the forefront and its cost has become starkly clear as the deaths mount.
The ‘network effects’ which a city provides have suddenly developed a sinister ring. Crowds, the biggest asset, have now become its biggest threat.
Is COVID-19 a moment of reckoning for our cities?
Let’s look at it today.
Circa 540 A.D., Emperor Justinian I held the throne of the Byzantium empire which covered modern-day North Africa, southern France, Italy and Spain. The emperor wanted to regain the glory of the golden era of the ancient Roman empire and was well on his way to do so.
In the year 540 CE, a fleet of ships left the port of Alexandria for some of the greatest trading cities in the Mediterranean region including those in Turkey, Italy and Spain.
The Plague of Justinian, as it came to be known after Emperor Justinian I who held the throne of Byzantium, is found to have transmitted through black rats that travelled on the grain ships and carts sent to Constantinople. As historian William Rosen wrote in his book ‘Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe’, the plague “would mark the end of one world, and the beginning of another. Along the way, it would consume at least 25 million human lives.”
This plague was caused by the microbe Yersinia pestis, the same one that caused the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century which I have written about previously.
In 1896, British traded opium and tea among other commodities with China. Ships carrying rats with the same virus entered Bombay (Yes, the plague was still active ~1,400 years after it first hit Constantinople). The damp squalid chawls of Bombay provided a fertile ground for the disease which raged for over 20 years in India, claiming ~10 million lives of which 160,000 were in Bombay alone.
Throughout human history, cities have been the epicentres of global pandemics. In fact, through the 18th and 19th century, industrial cities were often seen in a poor light.
Fredrich Engels, the German philosopher and a frequent collaborator of Karl Marx, called industrial Manchester in England, ‘the highest and most unconcealed pinnacle of social misery existing in our day’. He drew upon the misery of a rapidly industrializing city to form his view of capitalism exploiting the poor and uneducated.
Charles Dickens, the celebrated English writer, was no fan of London himself and who can blame him given how the city resembled.
The homes of the upper and middle class exist in close proximity to areas of unbelievable poverty and filth. Rich and poor alike are thrown together in the crowded city streets. Street sweepers attempt to keep the streets clean of manure, the result of thousands of horse-drawn vehicles. The city's thousands of chimney pots are belching coal smoke, resulting in soot which seems to settle everywhere. In many parts of the city raw sewage flows in gutters that empty into the Thames.
In 1853, the cholera outbreak that originated in Calcutta killed over 10,000 across London and Newcastle. The squalor of rapidly industrializing cities made them vulnerable to such outbreaks.
Yet, cities as a concept have proved to be remarkably resilient, continuing to grow, despite the grim history of pandemics.
Why?
Deyan Sudjic writes -
A city grows because it has the potential to be a wealth-creating machine for turning the poor into the not so poor. Selling shoelaces from a plastic bag at an illegal minibus stop at the edge of one of Johannesburg's townships, or Chinese-made toys from the pavement in Mexico City's Zocalo, is infinitely precarious, but it is still more secure than subsistence farming in drought-hit South Sudan or planting a smallholding in Chiapas in the face of narco-terrorists.
Some come to the city because they are would-be entrepreneurs, others because they are desperate. Cities flourish when they can attract people, not when they have to come, but because they want to. They come because cities offer people the chance to live better lives than they could have elsewhere.
In part, humans have been attracted to cities in search of a better life and they have continually been surprised to find unexpected opportunities and encounters. Inevitably, they became a part of something bigger than their whole. The compounding of creative energies driven by the profusion of diversity has continuously shaped culture, propelled human progress and reshaped the destiny of mankind.
So powerful is the allure of cities that historically, population migrating to cities has increased after the outbreak of pandemics such as the Black Death.
As I have covered in multiple posts, COVID-19 has battered the lynchpin of the urban economy - the service sector. The retail sector is gasping for survival as people stay indoors and increasingly move their offline purchases online.
This hurts not just the urban economy but also threatens the idiosyncratic characteristics of local neighbourhoods as small businesses get flattened and large corporate chains take over.
The department store, a 200-year-old American retail innovation, seems to be on its death bed. The restaurant industry, which had elevated eating out to a cultural art form, is recalibrating to a delivery-led-world. As online transactions grow, will smaller towns and neighbourhoods be engulfed by a sense of indistinguishable monotony?
Many of these spaces will stay empty for months, removing the bright awnings, cheeky signs, and crowded windows that were the face of their neighborhood. Long stretches of cities will feel facelessly anonymous. The streets will be quieter, too. Some urban residents might enjoy the feeling of a half-filled city; it will carry the eerie vibe of an awkward, permanent holiday. But even those cheered by the ample sidewalk room will find, in the darkened windows to their left and right, a shadow of the city they knew before the plague.
The real estate sector looks to be another casualty of COVID-19. In many cities, it is tottering on the brink of collapse. In India, squeeze on lending to real estate project developers, the uncertain return of migrant workers who power the sector and the collapse of demand due to the sluggish economy threaten to bring down the entire house of cards.
An inadvertent upside of depressed property prices could be the increased affordability of housing for younger and middle-income families. This can create diverse neighbourhoods, infusing fresh blood into places where home prices have long crossed the threshold of sanity thus putting them out of reach for this segment.
Yet, other challenges remain.
Take the elevator, arguably the most efficient form of transport invented by humans. It lies at the heart of urban density and verticalization of our cities. They have been a source of controversy since their inception.
The lengthiest of early elevator dilemmas seems to have been whether should a man remove his hat when sharing a lift with a lady.
That pressing issue was eventually answered (It is fine to wear a hat if you are sharing an elevator with a lady).
However, the concern around the levator seems grimmer today given the airborne transmission of the coronavirus. Who would feel comfortable riding up a crowded elevator anymore? Yet, how do we avoid them?
A few hacks are being tried.
Yet, it is unclear how successful they might be. Till there is conclusive evidence of a solution, it seems like wearing a mask, avoiding touching anything inside and waiting in long queues to board one with fewer people might be our short term future.
Consider public transport. Studies conducted in the aftermath of the SARS crisis showed a clear preference away from public modes of transport. Initial reports from China confirm a similar trend in the aftermath of COVID-19 with a preference for cars for personal transport.
Cities in countries like India and China, plagued by the worst air in the world, can ill afford this preference to play out. Having seen the blue skies, heard the chirping birds and enjoyed the clean air, will we value these attributes once things return to ‘normal’? If aided by the right policy mix, it can certainly be so.
An example is European cities which are taking the opportunity to reimagine public commute by unveiling large programs to encourage bicycles as a form of personal mobility.
Will our cities come out of this crisis successfully?
Different cities will come out of this crisis with varying degree of success. As Deyan Sudjic writes -
The city is humankind's most complex and extraordinary creation. It can be understood as a living organism. By their nature, living organisms can die when mistreated, or starved of resources, including people. At the same time, a city that is full of life is capable of endlessly adapting, flourishing in different circumstances, and with different inhabitants. Planned in the right way, it can support growing numbers of people. A successful city is an entity that is continually reconfiguring itself, changing its social structure and meaning, even if its contours don't look very different. And when it does take on dramatic new forms, the measure of success is the degree to which it maintains its essence.
Take the example of major global cities I used at the beginning of the piece - Constantinople and Bombay.
While Constantinople itself survived and even thrived in the centuries post the plague, the Byzantine Empire was weakened.
The population of the empire was dramatically reduced. For an empire that was primarily agrarian, it meant a shortage of food, as well as a sharp drop in the amount of taxes being paid to the state. The immediate result was famines that occurred in 542, and then again in 545 and 546. The decrease in the population of the empire also significantly weakened the military. The Empire’s capacity to resist its enemies had weakened.
Meanwhile, Bombay was reshaped due to the plague in 1896.
The Bombay Improvement Trust was set up in November 1898 to let “the fresh breezes of the sea into the congested lungs of Bombay”. It did so by clearing residential and commercial areas to make way for large east-west boulevards, such as Princess Street at Marine Lines and Sandhurst Road.
It also developed the areas of Dadar, Sion, Matunga and Wadala — mainly agricultural lands and villages — into aspirational suburbs. The BIT wanted to attract residents of the “slums” of Nagpada, Agripada, and Pydhonie to the new sites.
120 years later, the government’s drive to get people living in slums to move into government-built housing, continues.
COVID-19 has reshaped our cities. It will also reshape our lives as dwellers in its environs. Explosion of personal digital gadgets and collection of health and location data in the wake of the pandemic might end one of the most treasured features of the city life - anonymity.
Yet, cities themselves will exist because human creativity exists. While some have fallen by the wayside through the course of history, many have continued to morph and adapt to enable urban living. They have evolved because people, the driving force behind their sustenance, have wanted them to do so.
The Italian author Italo Calvino writes in his masterpiece, Invisible Cities, what I think is the best summary for why a city continues to fascinate us and will continue to do so.
You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
In other news
For those of you who would like to go deeper into the topic, apart from the books and articles that I have linked above, I found these podcasts to be particularly helpful.
Freakonomics Radio interview with Edward Glaeser - author of the book Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
Slate Money interview with Richard Florida - an urban theorist
Many of you like me might have taken to TikTok during the pandemic. Turner Novak has written the definitive piece on the platform and the parent company - Bytedance. I highly recommend it.
An incredible tale of interlinked supply chains. Fewer people are driving now resulting in a sharp decrease in demand for fuel. The US law mandates ethanol to be mixed in fuel to make it burn more cleanly. Due to low demand, ethanol plants are shut down too. A bi-product of ethanol is Carbon dioxide. Due to the reduced production of Cardon dioxide, the cost of bubbles in soda is going up. Consumers might end up paying more for soft drinks this summer due to lower demand for driving and oil.
Kerala vs Gujarat model has been the centrepiece of Indian development rhetoric. Raghu Sanjaylal Jaitley and Pranay Kotasthane have penned this great crisp piece to cut the clutter on this debate. They show that both the ‘models’ are a product of their history and neither is as ‘capitalist’ or ‘communist’ as the narrative will have you believe.
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