When the dust has settled, COVID-19 may actually improve our cities, forcing us to address a number of long-standing weaknesses and to boldly seize new opportunities. We will have learned from improvised \u201cpilots\u201d and adaptations that will not be reversed, and we will realize that the previous \u201cnormal\u201d was not that great in many respects and that getting back to \u201cnormal\u201d is not good enough.<\/p>\n
Pre-COVID, we were already in the early stages of a rebound from a post-Second World War car-centric vision of the city. In some form or other, visionary goals were to be found in the planning documents of almost every contemporary city in the developed world and of many in the developing world. This reflects an effort to be more sustainable and at the same time more equitable, diverse, inclusive, productive and welcoming.<\/p>\n
Central to this change is a rediscovery of many of the discarded virtues of the pre-war city \u2013 compact, walkable and mixed in use. A paradigm shift was underway in the older pre-war parts of city centres and with a time lag in post-war suburbs. This reshaping of the city was promising but with a very big to-do list and constant struggles in the trenches.<\/p>\n
Conflating density and overcrowding<\/strong><\/p>\n In 2020, COVID-19 erupted into our lives in North America. A first reaction in some circles was to question the very idea of the dense, compact, walkable city and to see it as a source of the problem. A widely circulated New York Times<\/em> article<\/a> by Brian Rosenthal on March 23 bore the alarming headline \u201cDensity Is New York City\u2019s Big \u2018Enemy\u2019 in the Coronavirus Fight\u201d and went on to proclaim \u201cNew York is more crowded than any large city in the country. That helps explain why it is the U.S. epicentre of the outbreak.\u201d<\/p>\n With this statement, an old confusion from the early decades of the 20th<\/sup> century resurfaced, demonizing the city itself as disease-prone, with tenement living and sweatshops producing conditions of overcrowding, disease and industrial pollution. This critical misunderstanding conflating density and overcrowding of people was described by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities<\/em><\/a> in this quote from the 1961 book:<\/p>\n \u201cThis confusion between high densities and overcrowding, which I will go into briefly because it so much interferes with understanding the role of densities, is another one of the obfuscations we have inherited from Garden City planning. The Garden City planners and their disciplines looked at slums which had both many dwelling units on the land (high densities) and too many people within individual dwellings (overcrowding), and failed to make any distinction between the fact of overcrowded rooms and the entirely different fact of densely built up land. They hated both equally, in any case, and coupled them like ham and eggs, so that to this day housers and planners pop out the phrase as if it were one word, \u2018highdensityandovercrowding.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The real correlation, which we now understand, has to do with overcrowding (which can also occur in low densities) and poverty, leading to a nexus of conditions that create vulnerability to infectious disease like COVID. A 2014 study, Improving Health by Design in the Greater-Toronto Hamilton Area<\/a>, by Peel Public Health, points out that sustainable community design helps combat high rates of hypertension, diabetes, obesity and heart disease \u2013 all of which are exacerbated by an automobile-dependent lifestyle \u2013 and that those design elements can also help lessen the spread of infectious diseases. (Figure 1)<\/p>\n