POST-PANDEMIC MUSINGS
By Professor Tom Muir
Pedestrians, cyclists and infrequent private cars and buses were all that were using the roads therefore the cities and urban areas seemed much more welcome to pedestrians. Only the commercial vehicles taking food to our food stores intruded on this subdued scene.
There was time for them to see the urban environment without having to dodge vast numbers of vehicles which had so obviously felt the space between buildings belonged to them. People working at home could explore their local environment, albeit under the invisible threat of the pandemic, but seeing it through a different perspective. Perhaps there was an integrity and vitality in the ‘suburbs’ contrary to the sneers of the often self-styled ‘urban elite’.
The problem of overcrowded cities has been with us for centuries and many where the problems are most critical, being historical world cities which were the focal point for every social, governmental, political, commercial and financial activity of the state. London is one such city where a dense compacted population of 8.2 million people is compressed into an urban area whose plan has evolved from a predominantly nineteenth century scale and encompasses all the elements of a twenty-first century capital city. It is generally considered to be on the verge of infrastructural breakdown and, with its population proving to be particularly vulnerable to the pandemic, would be seen to providing a quality of life to its residents which could be unacceptable to a 21st century society. This urban growth pattern is common in many countries and if it continues, then future pandemics might decimate populations.
Internationally, America, Canada, Australia and Brazil, have all chosen to locate their national capital in a separate city from their apparently more obvious existing great cities. More recently, to relieve the congestion in the existing capitals, Malaysia and Indonesia are planning to disperse their state capital from their present city to completely cities.
These policies have been implemented by either recent national government for national or political reasons or countries with command governments for population dispersal. Another possibly more appropriate model is where traditional specific activities or districts are dispersed in different cities or urban areas. The Netherlands is such an example where The Hague (Political capital), Amsterdam (Cultural) and Rotterdam (Port/commercial) share the roles often found within one traditional Capital city.
Returning to the effect of the pandemic in England in terms of land use, possibly the drive behind a new land use policy might be a by-product of the response to its affects. The recognition that amidst all the gloom of coronavirus, there may be glimmers of surprise possibilities. The result might be that the apathy currently demonstrated by people to the welter of evidence of the deteriorating quality of life, and health, in our great urban regions might now be changing. Cities and regions need not necessary always be like that. Centres need not always be the confrontation of gross wealth and poverty, the suburbs need not be the dormitories of the bourgeois, roads connecting them to their place of employment need not be like carparks in the morning and evening and racetracks the rest of the time. Land values, currently the currency of the wealthy capitalists and used primary for the creation of wealth for the few, are reflected in property values, and measured on a global scale and make little sense if seen in a national context.
Land values are a function of location and use. In order to materially affect the population spread and density it is necessary to make such changes desirable and obviously desirability will be interpreted differently for different users. As land is a component of any development, and land values form a systemic element in a market economy, then attempts to manage, or control land values will confront and question, some of the central values of the free enterprise, market economy.
Ebenezer Howard took the processes of the co-operative movement as a basis for resident participation in Welwyn Garden City near London in 1908. It was based upon the concept of an egalitarian community sharing management, investment and returns of the garden city. All community facilities including land, were owned and managed by the residents. It was, in fact a ‘closed’ system, suffering from the characteristic problems of being unable to expand and indeed when the City began to close in about it had an inability to retain the integrity of the principles on which it was founded. Land values started to become absorbed by London’s suburbia and its Garden spaces proved impossible to defend against the developers.
It was a closed system within a dynamic complexity of systems. Its experience suggests that attempts to exploit the new flexible life style possibly appearing on the wave of the post-pandemic experience must follow the aspirations of the people especially those who want a city which incorporated many of the better aspects revealed during the locking down experience. It needs to be led by government who must consider a dispersal of key urban system centres such as Government, Finance, Education, Sport, Recreation and other functions to other centres around the country, thereby hopefully reducing land values in the city centre and dispersing them to provincial centres. This would take brave leadership, but is it not time we had some of that?
This blog post and its content is copyright of Tom Muir 2020. (c) All rights reserved.
Any redistribution or reproduction of part or all of the contents in any form is prohibited other than the following:
You may print or download to a local hard disk extracts for your personal and non-commercial use only.
You may copy the content to individual third parties for their personal use, but only if you acknowledge the website as the source of material.
You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content. Nor may you transmit it or store it in any other website or other form of electronic retrieval system.
The Pandemic started in Wuhan, China in
approximately November 2019. It was known as Coronavirus and arrived in UK on March
2020, roughly at about the same time as the rest of the world was infected. Its
effect was initially like a winter flu, but it was highly contagious and
sometimes rapidly developed into a serious lung infection called Covid19 which
proved fatal in approximately 1% of cases.
There was neither medicine nor vaccine available
and countries reacted with dramatic methods of defence, mostly by shutting down
all the traditional systems of society such as employment, retail, education,
transportation, recreation, sports, etc. and requiring a quarantine of all
households within their own homes for an extensive period. The process of
working our way through this period was reported by the government to the
people on TV by a series of daily bulletins comprising maps, tables, charts and
statistics.
The process was called ‘Locked down’ and was
in effect a closure of all the normal processes of life that was the basis of
our society. This happened in almost every country in the world.
From this information and a simple analysis
of the data, patterns began to emerge.
* The
major centres of population were the first and initially with the most serious to
be infected being – London, Midlands, North west, North east.
*
Traffic dropped significantly, particularly the commuters and especially
public services, and many people accepted the invitation to work at home
* Elderly
people living together in care homes proved to be most vulnerable to infection
and for many it proved fatal. Their particular vulnerability was demonstrated
by the fact that 12% of deaths were people over the age of 65.
* The
quarantining of people meant that families not sharing the same home were split
up and could not participate in traditional family activities such a births and
deaths, the latter, due to the aggressively contagious nature of the virus,
proving particularly painful.
Another more positive phenomena was soon
apparent and that being the opportunity to see our towns, cities,
neighbourhoods and countryside under quite different conditions, namely devoid
of human use. The roads seemed wider, the sky seemed bigger and certainly
clearer (no planes), the air was less polluted even neighbours seemed more
neighbourly.
Pedestrians, cyclists and infrequent private cars and buses were all that were using the roads therefore the cities and urban areas seemed much more welcome to pedestrians. Only the commercial vehicles taking food to our food stores intruded on this subdued scene.
There was time for them to see the urban environment without having to dodge vast numbers of vehicles which had so obviously felt the space between buildings belonged to them. People working at home could explore their local environment, albeit under the invisible threat of the pandemic, but seeing it through a different perspective. Perhaps there was an integrity and vitality in the ‘suburbs’ contrary to the sneers of the often self-styled ‘urban elite’.
I started to visualise, that there might be a
new way of occupying our cities and urban conurbations with many people taking
advantage of new technologies to work at home, thereby changing the nature of
the traditional residential suburb and city office. If this could be possible,
then the post-industrial forms of our cities which are proving so inefficient
for the populations that now occupy them could be adapted to support different
lifestyles.
There are many models for city growth, but
today our cities have exploded to such an extent that governance of cities of
10 million plus, present almost an impossible task to manage. There are 33
cities in the world with more than 10 million people, more than triple the
number in 1990; 65% of the world’s population live in cities or urban
conurbations.
The problem of overcrowded cities has been with us for centuries and many where the problems are most critical, being historical world cities which were the focal point for every social, governmental, political, commercial and financial activity of the state. London is one such city where a dense compacted population of 8.2 million people is compressed into an urban area whose plan has evolved from a predominantly nineteenth century scale and encompasses all the elements of a twenty-first century capital city. It is generally considered to be on the verge of infrastructural breakdown and, with its population proving to be particularly vulnerable to the pandemic, would be seen to providing a quality of life to its residents which could be unacceptable to a 21st century society. This urban growth pattern is common in many countries and if it continues, then future pandemics might decimate populations.
Internationally, America, Canada, Australia and Brazil, have all chosen to locate their national capital in a separate city from their apparently more obvious existing great cities. More recently, to relieve the congestion in the existing capitals, Malaysia and Indonesia are planning to disperse their state capital from their present city to completely cities.
These policies have been implemented by either recent national government for national or political reasons or countries with command governments for population dispersal. Another possibly more appropriate model is where traditional specific activities or districts are dispersed in different cities or urban areas. The Netherlands is such an example where The Hague (Political capital), Amsterdam (Cultural) and Rotterdam (Port/commercial) share the roles often found within one traditional Capital city.
Returning to the effect of the pandemic in England in terms of land use, possibly the drive behind a new land use policy might be a by-product of the response to its affects. The recognition that amidst all the gloom of coronavirus, there may be glimmers of surprise possibilities. The result might be that the apathy currently demonstrated by people to the welter of evidence of the deteriorating quality of life, and health, in our great urban regions might now be changing. Cities and regions need not necessary always be like that. Centres need not always be the confrontation of gross wealth and poverty, the suburbs need not be the dormitories of the bourgeois, roads connecting them to their place of employment need not be like carparks in the morning and evening and racetracks the rest of the time. Land values, currently the currency of the wealthy capitalists and used primary for the creation of wealth for the few, are reflected in property values, and measured on a global scale and make little sense if seen in a national context.
Land values are a function of location and use. In order to materially affect the population spread and density it is necessary to make such changes desirable and obviously desirability will be interpreted differently for different users. As land is a component of any development, and land values form a systemic element in a market economy, then attempts to manage, or control land values will confront and question, some of the central values of the free enterprise, market economy.
Ebenezer Howard took the processes of the co-operative movement as a basis for resident participation in Welwyn Garden City near London in 1908. It was based upon the concept of an egalitarian community sharing management, investment and returns of the garden city. All community facilities including land, were owned and managed by the residents. It was, in fact a ‘closed’ system, suffering from the characteristic problems of being unable to expand and indeed when the City began to close in about it had an inability to retain the integrity of the principles on which it was founded. Land values started to become absorbed by London’s suburbia and its Garden spaces proved impossible to defend against the developers.
It was a closed system within a dynamic complexity of systems. Its experience suggests that attempts to exploit the new flexible life style possibly appearing on the wave of the post-pandemic experience must follow the aspirations of the people especially those who want a city which incorporated many of the better aspects revealed during the locking down experience. It needs to be led by government who must consider a dispersal of key urban system centres such as Government, Finance, Education, Sport, Recreation and other functions to other centres around the country, thereby hopefully reducing land values in the city centre and dispersing them to provincial centres. This would take brave leadership, but is it not time we had some of that?
*Images taken from the UK Office of National Statistics on 31 May 2020
Biography:
Tom is Professor (Emeritus),
Architect, Urban Planner, Urbanist, Rationalist and Utopian skeptic. You can
contact Tom on tdm36636@gmail.com.
This blog post and its content is copyright of Tom Muir 2020. (c) All rights reserved.
Any redistribution or reproduction of part or all of the contents in any form is prohibited other than the following:
You may print or download to a local hard disk extracts for your personal and non-commercial use only.
You may copy the content to individual third parties for their personal use, but only if you acknowledge the website as the source of material.
You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content. Nor may you transmit it or store it in any other website or other form of electronic retrieval system.
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