Illustrated by George Wylesol
For all their faults, cities are the infrastructure of equality.
This crisis is also an opening to remake them.
To not just survive this crisis, but create opportunity for decades to come.
The Spaces That Make Cities Fairer and More Resilient
Our shared economy depends most on what happens in between.
On a cold, clear April 3, 1979, the city then known as “Grey Barcelona” held its first free local election since 1934. Soon after, the city’s new planning director, Oriol Bohigas, helped devise a novel strategy for rescuing the city’s urban life from the Franco-era haze of corruption and neglect that brought the unwelcome nickname.
Instead of the master plans and showpiece projects usually beloved of mayors and planners, the city undertook a rapid and remarkable investment in the so-called “homogeneity” of the city’s pedestrian spaces. In a widespread act of care and repair, new carpets of granite and tile spread across sidewalks and plazas, in both rich neighborhoods and poor.
Wherever you walked, and whoever you were, it seemed, a gracious and accessible surface was ready to receive you. Showpiece projects and large-scale plans, of course, arrived with the 1992 Olympics. But their fluid foundation, and that of the urban renaissance that followed, was the welcoming river of public space that flowed through, and connected, the city.
Four decades and a continent away, America’s latest Gilded Age has widened divisions in our society, even as the urban landscape often collapses them into a single gaze. From the needle-thin condo-towers of contemporary Manhattan to the needle-strewn gutters of San Francisco’s tech-gentrifying Tenderloin, it is hard to escape the prospect of profound inequity.
Until recently, my own journey to work often took me walking through just such a landscape: homeless encampments squeezed to the left of a sidewalk in downtown Oakland; shiny, shaded-window tech-buses idling to the right; those in the middle just trying to squeeze in between. Far too abundant in today’s America, such circumstances are also as old as urban life itself. Effectively, many cities overlap within a single physical space, offering radically different opportunities to those who live in them.
Yet this physical overlap also creates the enormous potential that our cities have to create opportunity, and bring people together. This power, well understood by Barcelona’s planners and community organizers as they walked from the shadow of their grey decades, is the ability of physical space to bring many cities together, unexpectedly and instrumentally. And to begin to craft, out of many cities, one.
Like a chemical catalyst, the sidewalk and the street edge are the surface on which all the atoms of a metropolis come together, react with each other and produce energy. In practical terms, this is because public space provides a restaurant owner, someone posting dog-walking services, or a midnight clubgoer the chance to meet anybody, with any imaginable result. The equality of access to a busy city street, combined with the creativity and skill required to thrive there, is the meritocratic mechanism at the heart of urban life. Over time, cities developed regular streets to hold and channel shared infrastructure. But the equal and accessible public space created by streets is the most essential infrastructure of all.
In our current crisis, we see the absence of street life in the devastating effect of shelter-in-place orders on creative and essential small businesses. But we all feel this loss, with its own devastation, in the joylessness of life without the serendipity or chance encounters that the city street provides.
Much has already been written about how this pandemic provides an opportunity to remake, or redesign cities. But such statements mostly reveal our recent, pharmaceutical-era amnesia about the inextricable history of disease and urban life. The fact that the same forces that bring us together to share and create also create the possibility of contagion is a design problem as old as cities themselves. And some of our best and most effective public spaces are the result.
The 19th century belief that malaria — literally, “bad air” — sprang from poor ventilation, inspired Frederick Law Olmsted’s designs for Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, among each city’s most gracious public spaces. In Paris, cholera epidemics in the 1830s led to the grandest sewer system in Europe — and not incidentally to the grand boulevards and public spaces on top of that sewer system. In Barcelona the same disease, rampant in cramped, lower-class neighborhoods, helped create the vast, open grid of the city’s extension, or Eixample, designed by Ildefons Cerdà in 1859, and finished by 1897 (At the time, because of its resemblance to the avenues of New York City, it was critiqued as “too American.”)
Even today, these projects help embody the idea that the health of cities is connected to every part of a complex metabolism — equal and effective circulation above all. Yet from Mission Bay in San Francisco to Hudson Yards in Manhattan, too much urban investment of the last decade has focused on creating or revamping densely profitable urban centers, and not improving and expanding all the spaces between them. But it is on these in-between spaces — on our journeys, not our destinations — that our shared economy most depends.
While it pains me to say it as an urban designer, we often do not need entirely new ideas to improve our cities. But sometimes, it appears, we need a crisis. In the last few weeks, to allow for a safer, more widespread, and not incidentally more equitable access to open space, cities across the world have closed streets to cars and opened them to pedestrian and bicycle traffic. Oakland has been a leader, transforming 10 percent of its streets into public promenades. San Francisco, New York and others have followed. Already in Seattle, there is talk of making such changes permanent.
The idea that safe, generous and accessible common space is fundamental to public life is an essential American idea — as old as the Boston Common — but if our current catastrophe can help recapture this birthright, it will have served a small purpose.
Today, our common space is more than sidewalks and parks. In these times, cities such as Seattle, Los Angeles and Denver are making municipal bus travel free, to help essential workers and protect the health of drivers, since riders can enter at the back. This spirit should also continue once the pandemic has passed. We have a blind spot in the U.S. around seeing public transportation as something that has to compete in the market — rather than as an essential service and an economic engine that, particularly when it is cheap and reliable, repays investment by enabling and stimulating employment and business activity. (Whereas driving, with its enormous cost of pollution and road maintenance, is seen as a right.)
Just as elsewhere in our cities, the same changes in public transportation that will make it more effective and less of a platform for contagion — more frequent, dependable service, low or no cost — will also drive economic opportunity for the most vulnerable.
Here, another symptom of this crisis is worth mentioning — the exodus of public life to privately owned, online spaces. In the last two months, we have leaned away from in-person interactions, and leaned into the structures that the internet already gives to our shared existence. At the same time, we have looked online to try to bring to our lives the qualities — surprise; chance; a loose, supportive web of friendship — that urban life normally brings us.
Yet for all the superficial serendipity of social media, for every online happy hour that somehow avoids being simultaneously boring and stressful, the public spaces of the internet are laughably impoverished when compared with a simple sidewalk. Just like Hudson Yards, our online platforms mostly give us shiny, narrow simulations of public life — but only enough to sustain private profit. And as with any shopping mall, the shared spaces of virtual life are accessible only so long as we support the commerce on which they are sustained. For online spaces, the price is almost always the value of their surveillance of us. The local controversy around the Google sibling Sidewalk Labs’ data-driven “city of the future” in Toronto, which was canceled last week, highlights how queasy we become when the business of information, space and citizenship become more obviously entwined.
Online or offline, a lack of equity and accessibility (and serendipity) has the same effect. The same small-business owner who mourns the current demise of foot traffic also mourns the evermore inscrutable algorithms that present content to those who wander on the screen. With the death of unexpected discovery comes the death of creative, and economic, opportunity in any kind of space. If our newly strengthened reliance on virtual spaces, and their ever more intertwined relationship to public life, makes us demand more accountability and access online as well, then the result will also help ensure our civic health.
There will be more predictable uncertainty to follow for the metropolitan web of physical and digital space that emerges from our current crisis — not least from the climate crisis that encloses our current tragedy. Equal, accessible and resilient public space can promote civic health during a pandemic. Over the long term it will promote the health, welfare and equality of our cities for decades to come. For in the end, urban resilience is not purely a physical, nor a social, nor an economic goal. It is one, like well-made streets and sidewalks, that should connect every part of public life.
Nicholas de Monchaux is a professor and the incoming head of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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