Everyone is talking about what we are learning from the events of the 2020, and how things might change when it is over. We have already looked at how our home designs might change, and even how our bathrooms might adapt. But what about our cities? The way we live, the way we get around? How must all of this adapt?
This Is Not an Issue of Density
There is still a lot of talk about density, which we previously discussed in Urban density is not the enemy, it is your friend. But as Dan Herriges notes in Strong Towns, it might well be easier to control the spread of viruses when people are more concentrated.
And as I keep tweeting, it’s how you do density that matters.
More “Missing Middle” and Goldilocks Density
The problem is not that cities are dense (because in North America they are not), it’s that they are spiky. There are square miles of single-family housing, while the apartment buildings and condos are piled up on former industrial lands far from the NIMBYs. We need to smooth it out with more “missing middle” housing. As Daniel Parolek wrote:
This kind of housing can accommodate a lot of people, yet leaves a lot of open space. You don’t have to be trapped in an elevator; you can easily get outside. In the densest parts of our cities, people do not have access to green space, and the sidewalks are crowded, there is nowhere to go. But if you spread the density around, you can accommodate just as many people and still give them room to breathe. I have called it the Goldilocks Density:
Richard Florida also notes in the Globe and Mail that there are different kinds of density:
Widen the Sidewalks and Make Way for Micromobility
One of the things that has become abundantly clear is how much space we have given up to cars, both moving and parked. There’s John Massengale’s famous shot of Lexington Avenue in New York, where they took out all the light wells and stairs and even knocked off all the ornaments to take away sidewalk space. And as Toronto activist Gil Meslin demonstrates, it even happened in suburban Toronto at a smaller scale.
Now, everyone trying to keep six feet apart means that people need a lot more sidewalk space. Yet the sidewalk space is used for everything; people don’t put all their garbage in the roads, that’s reserved for storing cars. Instead, people have to walk around all of this. Maybe New York needs a garbage lane as well as a bike lane. We quoted architect Toon Dreeson earlier:
Richard Florida suggests that these changes should be permanent:
Rethink the Office
One of the main restraints on the growth of working from home was management resistance; many businesses just didn’t permit it. But because of high operating costs, they just kept increasing the office densities, so private offices gave way to cubicles which gave way to basically shared desks. But now managers have been forced to adapt to the situation, and more importantly, nobody is going to want to come back to those offices we had before. Nobody is going to want to sit three feet away from someone who is coughing. Eric Reguly of the Globe and Mail writes:
He thinks it might actually reduce the amount of office space that is needed in our downtowns. “Tight office-space supply could turn into a surplus really fast. Goodbye construction cranes.”
Focus on Transit-Oriented Development with Streetcars, Not Subways
Subways are great at moving huge numbers of people in short windows of time, like rush hours when hundreds of thousands of people are trying to get downtown all at once. But what if Reguly is right, and people are not going downtown and are working from home and spending more time in their own neighborhoods? That’s when you want streetcars and buses, where you can go short distances, you don’t have to climb up and down stairs, and you can look out windows. That’s why Toronto should cancel its multi-billion dollar subway right now; there may not be anywhere near the demand that is projected, and that’s why they need to invest in the streetcar network.
Furthermore, those surface routes need a lot more capacity. Right now in Toronto where I live, the buses are packed, but they are not going downtown to the office buildings. Ben Spurr writes in the Star:
Jarrett Walker writes in Citylab about who is riding the buses, and how transit makes urban civilization possible. But he also points out that we have to change our way of thinking about why we actually have transit.
Everyone is suddenly calling the grocery clerks and couriers and cleaners “heroes” because they are doing the work that is needed to keep us all going. They have no choice. Walker points out that our transit systems are not serving them as much as they are serving us.
Fix Our Main Streets
Dupont Street/ Lloyd Alter/CC BY 2.0
This scene near where I live is not unusual; in many cities the neighborhood retail stores are gone. Big box stores, online shopping, and high property taxes have all conspired to make life difficult for small businesses on main streets. After noting that the office downtown may be dead, Eric Reguly thought that the trend toward working from home might actually help revitalize other parts of our communities.
Richard Florida stresses the importance of saving our main streets, writing in Brookings:
Let’s Not Forget What We Build Cities For
Last word goes to Daniel Herriges in Strong Towns, who reminds us why we are here in cities:
