Policy challenges for the post-pandemic city

2020 was meant to be a relatively uneventful year in the global transition to a largely urban world. Half the world’s population was already living in cities, projected to rise to two-thirds by 2050. The world’s urban centre of gravity was moving, or rather returning, East. Moreover, in many parts of the world, a new type of urban structure had emerged – the polycentric mega-region: groups of cities in which populations and economic activities are linked over a wider geographical area, facilitated by improvements in transport (high-speed rail), technology (high-speed internet) and global connectivity (airports and seaports).

But 2020 didn’t follow the script. A global pandemic, on a scale not seen for a century and with echoes of earlier plagues, has upended established economic, social and physical norms, and seems to threaten the rise of the city. Are we now headed for a new Age of Dispersal – an era marked by lower population densities, lower rates of mobility – especially long-distance mobility – and the growing importance of smaller cities and towns?

Over the last 30 years, an elite group of cities has thrived as key nodes of the global economy, attractors of talent, ideas and wealth in an ever-more-connected system. But in the last few months, we have glimpsed a looking-glass world where the very benefits of global cities – high degree of connectivity, density and agglomeration – have been found also to be vulnerabilities.

Building on the work of Jean Gottmann (1961) in his study of the Boston–New York–Washington ‘megalopolis’, Peter Hall, working with Kathy Pain, defined the term ‘polycentric mega-city region’, and characterised it as arising from the long-term process of very extended decentralisation from big central cities to adjacent smaller ones, old and new (Hall and Pain, 2006). This process was accelerated by late 20th century regional developments in East and South-East Asia, in places like the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta in China, the Tokyo-Osaka corridor in Japan and Greater Jakarta. Each city and town within the network is both its ‘own place’ and also part of a wider functional urban region, held together by ‘dense flows of people and information carried along motorways, high-speed rail lines and telecommunications cables’.

Polycentric, mega-region structures may have some advantages over the traditional urban pattern in which a dense centre of concentrated economic activity is surrounded by successive rings of mainly residential development. A polycentric model might be more flexible in accommodating necessary post-COVID changes, by spreading out economic activity while retaining connectivity and some aspects of centrality. If high-speed rail has to carry many fewer passengers per carriage to allow social distancing, then two-way or multi-way commuting may, along with home-working, be part of the solution. A multi-polar mega-city could allow more scope for people to live closer to decentralised employment, while still facilitating central agglomeration for those ‘apex’ economic activities which most require it.

It is far too soon to understand fully what the medium and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic might be. But we can already see how both the pandemic itself and the non-pharmaceutical interventions taken in response to it have accelerated existing trends. In sectors of the economy such as financial and other business services, technology and government, we have seen a huge rise in working from home. This experience of ‘telecommuting’ will have long-term consequences, speeding up both digital transformation within firms, and the attitudes and behaviours of both firms and workers.

Nevertheless, agglomeration economies still hold: proximity brings economic benefits in terms of creating and developing ideas, diffusing innovations, reducing costs, deepening labour markets and maintaining institutional resilience and trust. Most of us (there are outliers) value some balance between the independence of working from home and the social contact that a work environment provides. Cities have coped with and responded to pandemics and other natural and man-made disasters for centuries. Previous pandemics had economic and social effects, some long-lasting – but do not appear to have fundamentally changed the direction of economic and social development.

However, many firms will now re-consider (or consider for the first time) the balance of costs and benefits for distributed versus concentrated working, and the bottom-line value of expensive large national or international meetings and conferences as against online events. Skilled workers may choose to live in more affordable or higher amenity locations relatively distant from their workplace if the daily commute is replaced by working from home supplemented by weekly or monthly in-person meetings. On the supply side, social distancing may be with us for some time, reducing the capacity of offices and other workplaces, as well as public transport networks. Mass commuting cannot be assumed to return to past levels, in the light of behavioural change from workers and employers.

The habit of online shopping will now be engrained with many consumers who might not otherwise have had the experience, and it seems likely that at least part of the shift to online will persist. High streets may become home to a wider range of uses, including more employment and housing.

The picture is much less clear regarding urban mobility. We have seen two contradictory trends in many places over the last few months. On the one hand, action by mayors and city leaders to provide more walking and cycling by re-allocating roadspace – under-used by vehicle traffic in the lockdown – to walkers and cyclists. On the other hand, a continuing ‘fear of transit’ on the part of the public leading to an increase in car use (Wright, 2020) as activities resume. It is not clear how these contradictory trends can be resolved; it certainly raises again the arguments for greater use of congestion charging and road pricing.

For the leisure, hospitality, culture, night-time economy and events sectors that are a vital part of many global city economies, social distancing is not just an additional cost factor but a possible threat to the viability, or at least the size, of these sectors. Adaptations are possible – the use of screens and masks, limiting attendance, strict social distancing, making better use of outdoor spaces such as car parks. But if social distancing is to remain for any length of time, there will be long-term impacts on these sectors.

It was already the case that declining air quality, rising costs and lack of affordability, traffic congestion and other urban ills were checking the attractiveness of large cities. As William Frey (2020) of the Brookings Institution has shown, in the United States, the major metropolitan areas grew faster than the rest of the country in the first half of the 2010s, but in the second half of the decade, they suffered slower growth and even declines in population. Meanwhile, smaller cities, suburbs and rural areas had more modest declines and even population gains.

The pandemic accelerates this trend and perhaps points towards a flatter hierarchy of cities, with a stronger role for medium-sized and smaller cities, where urban benefits can be better balanced with increased demand for space (both internally and externally) and non-urban amenities.

In the UK, London’s economic productivity and success has continued to outpace all other regions (Anderson et al., 2020). Much of the UK increasingly relies on fiscal transfers from an ever-growing and ever more successful London (or, rather, Greater South East). This is not desirable and is probably not sustainable. Some relocation of economic activity, within a growing national economy, out of the central area to other parts of London and to second- and third-tier cities is probably both feasible and desirable. But on present trends and policies, this economic decentralisation is likely to be small- and medium-sized cities in the Greater South East and to provincial cities that are well-connected to London, rather than to economically lagging areas. In this context, it might be more useful to think about the current investment in high-speed rail (HS2) in the UK not as part of ‘re-balancing’ the UK economy, but rather as assisting the evolution of much of urban England into a single mega-city region focussed on London. Is this a desirable goal for policy?

What about changes within cities? There might be some re-balancing of activity and investment between the Central Business District and secondary centres within the same large city. Market mechanisms – changes in demand, prices and rents – will drive this but could be helped (or hindered) by government policies. Crises can be a spur to action, and even an opportunity to develop a more equitable and sustainable city. But there is just as much risk or more of an (even) more unequal city. We are already seeing that the pandemic and its aftermath clearly impacts differentially on different social groups and economic sectors.

The lure of the city remains, and successful cities adapt and change. In the Great Plague of 1665, Newton left Cambridge to ‘work from home’ in his native rural Lincolnshire on calculus, optics and of course gravity. But later he moved back to Cambridge to continue his work, and then to London to become warden (later Master) of the Royal Mint, and after that, President of the Royal Society. Three centuries later, in the decades after the Second World War, London’s manufacturing base dwindled to a fraction of its former self, and the Docks, the hub of the world’s goods-trading economy, were closed. But London was reborn as a city of services – financial, business, educational, creative, cultural, scientific, technological and more.

We do not yet know the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. It may be that our BC (Before Covid) era will give way to a new era AD (After Density). But cities – in perhaps a different form now – will still be an important part of the picture.