Planning and the Post-Pandemic City

The Covid-19 pandemic has left society dazed and confused. Self-evidently momentous, its multifaceted impacts upon the functioning and experience of city living have been swift and deep. This has precipitated a range of laudable research in planning, which, among other foci, has sought to examine how the disruption is amplifying inequities (Cole et al., 2020), improving urban environmental quality (Sharifi & Khavarian-Garmsir, 2020) and generating enhanced demand for public space (Sepe, 2021; Ugolini et al., 2020). The pandemic has also heightened interest in re-engaging planning with its roots in public health (Lennon, 2020; Scott, 2020). Here, an emerging strand of research is exploring how to better proof our cities from the ill-effects of future contagions (Bereitschaft & Scheller, 2020; Martínez & Short, 2021). Yet, there is another dimension to the pandemic that may have impacts which shake the very foundations of how we think cities could and should evolve. This results from the current great experiment in spatial reorganisation that stretches well beyond the requirement of social distancing. Specifically, never before in a time of peace have so many peoples’ lives been so comprehensively decoupled from their places of work for such an extensive period of time. Indeed, while the effects of social distancing are immediately apparent in how we have found new ways to negotiate spaces, it is perhaps remote working that will have the longest impact on our cities. This was alluded to but not elaborated on in a recent superb editorial by Jill Grant in this journal (Grant, 2020). Hence, I propose in this short comment piece to extend this line of speculation.

For centuries cities have pulled people into their orbit in search of employment, education and new experiences. Conventionally conceived as places of opportunity, cities are seen to thrive where a critical threshold of population and capital spawn dynamic and diverse economies and cultures, in which residents flourish in choice and convenience. Yet despite such lofty descriptions, for most cities it is employment that is the magnet and motor of urban land use that heavily influences where people live, shop and recreate. These two cardinal poles of home and work have long dictated how people flow around and use urban spaces: from school runs to restaurants; from retail to recreation. It is this spatial relationship embedded in the daily patterns of life that helps create and carry communities. But if people are no longer limited by their place or time of work, will it follow that they will choose to lumber themselves with the outsized mortgages, additional expenses and stresses of urban living?

This is potentially problematic for conventional thinking in planning. For example, the compact city model and the different forms of ‘new urbanism’ it has begotten, is a common template for the illusive ‘sustainable community’ (Garde, 2020; Mehaffy & Haas, 2020). Here, people work, live, shop and socialise in medium density configurations that reduce car dependency, provide opportunities for neighbourly interaction and facilitate a broad range of energy efficiencies. Even higher densities are often advocated in central city locations where they are seen as both normative and necessary for the success of urban regeneration schemes (Lehmann, 2019). While still taught on planning programmes and occasionally discussed among planners, alternative lower density models such as the ‘garden city’ have fallen into disfavour as they are considered too space extensive, inefficient and likely to induce car dependency. But will all our models soon be overtaken by circumstance?

In particular, the question arises as to whether this great experiment in remote working holds the potential to reshape our cities by reprofiling our reasons for living in them. From the centripetal forces concentrating people in medieval fortress towns and industrial cities, to the centrifugal influences of suburban flight, many of the significant changes in the morphology of our cities have been propelled by technological advancements – be it in defensive construction methods, the steam engine or the private motorcar. For decades, the computer has been threatening to reshape our cities; perhaps its time has come! Indeed, a whole field in ‘smart city’ research has emerged on the assumption that the integration of computer technologies into the city will help transform urban living by optimising the responsiveness of management options (Bibri, 2018). However, the pandemic may ultimately mean that twenty-first century technologies transform the city, not by optimising the management of urban infrastructures and services, but by eroding the very influence of work-home proximity that has long since been the gravity drawing people to cities. For, if the option of remote working means that a sizeable minority of us are footloose with respect to where we live, does urban living as we know it change as the pull of alternative lifestyle options in geographically dispersed locations weaken the attractive force of cities? Does this then reduce the critical mass of people needed to sustain the very offer that makes city living, as we conventionally envisage it, attractive beyond the necessities of proximity to one’s place of work? Now let me be clear: I’m not so naïve as to sound the death knell for our cities. History shows that cities have survived and thrived in the wake of all forms of calamity, including pandemics. Furthermore, the considerable sunken costs of property and social networks to name just two issues, means that change would likely be inter rather than intra generational. Nevertheless, I do wonder if we are on the cusp of a new trajectory that over time will alter how we perceive the city. Afterall, the private motorcar was supposed to offer freedom; yet for many it has had the unintended consequence of lengthy commutes, long hours trapped in traffic jams, air pollution, inner city depopulation, community segregation and a host of other ills that planning has been attempting to address for decades. So, what unintended consequences might this great experiment in remote working mean for planning?

With a focus on placemaking, our thinking in planning has evolved around encouraging predicable flows of people through spaces geared towards a conception of the model user, in all too frequently design-deterministic visions of sustainable urban communities. Yet, in a potential urban form characterised by reduced populations dispersed across space and time, and freed from geographical proximity to their place of work (and traditional working hours), will this model still hold water? In essence, will we need to reconsider some of the assumptions that underpin planning – most particularly our understanding of ‘the city’ and the motivations of the people who populate it. Hence, we may need to pause and ask ourselves; are the models we use suitably robust for the new city forms that may await us? No longer profiled by traditional time-space flows and home-work geographical distributions, many would-be urban residents may opt for bundles of attributes that provide them with opportunities to realise the lifestyle that they value, but which are currently not offered by the urban public realm. In essence they may vote with their feet and leave. The placemaking of this new normal may thereby require a departure from the functions, forms and interventions that comprise our bank of knowledge and practices.

We hear much of ‘resilience’ in contemporary planning discourses. Normally this addresses issues concerning the ability of cities to adapt and continue functioning in the context of climate change, environmental risks (flooding, heat stress etc) and/or economic shocks (Davoudi et al., 2012; Eraydin & Taşan-Kok, 2012). While a worthy debate, such thinking generally presumes that the city as we know it will serve much the same purposes that it currently performs. However, if the ties of home and work are loosened, such that traditional land use distributions are frayed, are our presumptions on the feasible endurance of current urban functions plausible? Indeed, there is now much talk in planning of a return to normal, or at least a ‘new normal’ that implicitly replicates what has come before (Yamagata & Yoshida, 2020). Yet, the thin edge of the wedge may already be unfastening long held assumptions on what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’ that have shaped much planning theory and practice.

I don’t claim to have the answers and I’m certainly not advocating urban sprawl – the downsides of that have been lived and studied for generations (Batty, 2020). But I do think it is worth reflecting on potential alternate urban realities, lest we miss emerging trends in a blinkered desire to realise visions of the ‘sustainable city’ that are bound-up with concepts of urban living, which are being undermined by nascent socio-technical imaginaries. In this sense, it would be beneficial to open a new line of discussion that moves beyond debates on creating a more ‘just’, ‘sustainable’, ‘smart’ or ‘resilient’ post-covid city. Specifically, I wonder if practitioners and academics would profit from questioning which explores how we can rethink our approaches to planning in a time when our understanding of the city may have to alter in unprecedented ways, as the lock – binding homes to places of work – is released.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the UCD Planning and Environmental Policy Society for the invitation to speak at their spring seminar, which prompted him to reflect and produce this piece.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Mick Lennon

Mick Lennon researches and teaches at the UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, Dublin, Ireland. His work focuses on the intersections between planning and environmental policy, with a particular emphasis on green-blue infrastructures, sustainable communities and socio-ecological transitions.