Suburban Flight and the Decline of Cities?
Talk of pandemic-induced changes in city living may be accurate, but not in the way we think.
As the United States heads into the second wave of the novel coronavirus, there is uncertainty about how the pandemic will shape the future of American cities. Earlier this years, cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles bore the brunt of COVID-19 infections. Now, with cases surging across the country, there is not only concern over what the so-called new normal will look like once the virus is finally under control, but whether the things we most associate with cities – packed public transit, bustling farmer’s markets, nightlife, and tourism – will return to their pre-pandemic heyday in the foreseeable future.
Much of this speculation is based on the idea that the coronavirus has jump-started a second wave of suburban migration in cities like New York (the first wave of suburban flight in the United States being the relocation of predominantly white families from culturally and racially diversifying cities, such as Detroit, in the 1950s and 1960s). The logic here is sound: urban density and crowding are legitimate threats to public health. With work, school, and even socializing shifting online, news stories of families fleeing to the suburbs are in many parts of the country are common.
But such anecdotal reports are often framed as a country-wide trend, dovetailing with fears of a looming eviction crisis and projecting a decline or fundamental change in city living as populations are either electing to leave or actively being pushed out of urban areas.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of such claims – not least of all the lack of supporting data that confirms the coronavirus is currently worse in cities – but here are two more to consider.
Controlled density.
First, narratives of suburban flight underplay that cities might actually be better suited to controlling public health emergencies.
Earlier this year, New York City was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. As testing ramped up, daily reported cases surged from a couple hundred in mid-March to over 12,000 in early April. The virus proved deadly, too, killing over 700 New Yorkers every day. But daily cases rapidly dropped to the hundreds in the weeks that followed and the city reported zero deaths on July 11. The rapid and effective flattening of New York’s curve is not surprising given the actions taken by city and state officials. Indeed, while the Big Apple’s transit system, crowded streets, and nightlife might have accelerated COVID-19 infections early on, it was the swift shutdown of such round-the-clock activity paired with a consistent public messaging campaign that controlled the spread of the virus.
Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+coronavirus&oq=new+&aqs=chrome.1.69i59l3j69i60l3j69i65l2.4041j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Source: “Gov. Andrew Cuomo Extends Lockdown, Expands Mask Requirement” https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-04-16/gov-andrew-cuomo-extends-new-york-lockdown-expands-mask-requirement
An unexpected example from outside the United States further shows how lockdowns in dense urban areas strangle the threat of widespread infections and high death rates. As I have written before, Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city was seen as at significant risk from the pandemic earlier this year. Much of the South Asian nation’s puzzling escape from the worst of the virus can be attributed to chance and luck. But, it is impossible to ignore the impact of Karachi’s “smart lockdown” strategy which completely cordoned off virus hotspots without having to enforce an impractical and possibly unenforceable (given Karachi’s politically and institutionally fraught context) city-wide lockdown.
Returning to the United States, Los Angeles might be the exception that proves the rule. A stay at home order in March this year restricting outdoor activities and non-essential travel appeared to dampen the rise in cases. But, with restrictions easing before the summer, the reported number of daily cases rose rapidly with Los Angeles hitting its peak of over 12,000 in late June (for comparison’s sake, New York hit similar numbers in early April.)
What do these comparisons tell us? That cities with their congested streets, packed residential and economic districts, and close-knit built structures are at unique risk from the pandemic? Certainly. But, they also tell us that density, rather than an unchangeable characteristic of urban areas, is a variable that discerning city officials can control. In other words, cities are capable of altering the very characteristics which put them at risk in a public health context.
Public health emergencies are what make cities livable.
Second, talk of a suburban flight-induced decline in cities ignores that public health emergencies have historically shaped and produced metropolitan areas as we now know them.
Paris’ cholera outbreak in 1832 which claimed 19,000 lives and the (inaccurately named) Spanish Flu global pandemic between 1918 and 1920 – the deadliest in recent history – are two significant examples of health emergencies. Rather than depressing urban growth and economic activity in the long term, these events were instances in which cities respectively began to take public health seriously and became contexts in which contemporary containment strategies like social distancing, lockdowns, and travel restrictions were first developed.
The truth is that public health and urban growth have long been intertwined in a symbiotic relationship. Urbanization in the 18th and 19th centuries created the conditions for the outbreak of infectious diseases by packing people together in unhygienic conditions; in turn, the death and devastation caused by various outbreaks placed public health at the center of how technocrats approached the design and layout of cities; finally, with public health becoming indispensable to urban planning, urbanization has become more sustainable (and less deadly) as a phenomenon.
In short, though the current coronavirus pandemic has threatened, bullied, and challenged urban dwellers, the contemporary moment is not new given the public health history of metropolitan areas.
This is, of course, not to downplay the significant loss of life, jobs, and normalcy due to the current pandemic. But it is to say that, rather than declining, cities might become more efficient and productive because of COVID-19. Indeed, urban planners are already discussing how digital technologies and infrastructure might be the 21st century equivalent of sanitation networks in the 19th century which made cities more pandemic proof.
Post-pandemic cities?
It’s easy to see suburban flight (or reports of it, rather) as a precursor for the decline of cities in the midst of a pandemic that seems to strike urban areas. But history has shown that cities are deeply resilient. This is because they are more than just physical areas that meet a certain population size and density. Rather, cities function as unique socioeconomic structures that facilitate specific kinds of activity. For instance, cities are engines of economic growth, providing countries with access to the global economy through regulated activities such as tourism, foreign direct investment, and immigration. At the street-level, cities are also places that give rise to so-called “informal” social structures that provide marginalized communities with some measure of social security when moving elsewhere is unaffordable or impossible. (The desirability of such informality is debatable, especially when it tends to romanticize poverty.)
All this is to make the basic point that cities are complex systems produced through the aggregation of multiple historical – including public health emergencies.
This is not to say that the contemporary moment is not precarious. Indeed, the pandemic has exacerbated many challenges that urban life itself has produced over decades including homelessness, environmental degradation, and racial inequality.
A second suburban flight, however, is unlikely to be a problem for cities during the pandemic - or indeed once it is all over.