In Why America’s Richest Cities Keep Getting Richer, a 2017 article in The Atlantic, urban studies professor and author Richard Florida wrote: “The most important and innovative industries and the most talented, most ambitious, and wealthiest people are converging as never before in a relative handful of leading superstar cities that are knowledge and tech hubs. This small group of elite places forge ever forward, while most others struggle, stagnate, or fall behind… They are not just the places where the most ambitious and most talented people want to be - they are where such people feel they need to be.”
Knowledge-intensive industries have long been centered in cities and surrounding metropolitan areas, where they’ve had the most access to a college educated, high skill workforce. But, - from Milan to New York, - high density, globally connected urban areas have been ground zero for the spread of Covid-19. Are cities now at risk of losing the superstar status they’ve enjoyed over the past several decades?
This is not the first time we’ve asked this question in the recent past. In the mid-late 1990s, some predicted that the Internet would lead to the decline of cities, because it would enable people to work and shop from home, be in touch with their friends over e-mail, and get access to news and entertainment online. But, instead of declining, megacities have continued to generate the greatest levels of innovation and good jobs, and thus attract a disproportionate share of the world’s talent.
Why have urban areas fared so well, especially over the past few decades?
About 25 years ago, physicist Geoffrey West, - Distinguished Professor and Past President of the Santa Fe Institute, - got interested in whether some of the techniques from the world of physics could be applied to the study of complex biological and social systems. In particular, he wondered if we could apply empirical, quantifiable and predictive scientific methods to help us better understand cities and other highly complex social organizations.
Dr. West and his collaborators analyzed an extensive body of data about cities around the world to explore the scaling relations between population and a wide range of infrastructure and socioeconomic measures. They discovered that the measurable infrastructure of cities, - e.g., the lengths of roadways and electrical lines, energy consumption, the number of gas stations, - scale sublinearly, with a scaling factor of .85. That means that cities enjoy a 15% benefit in economies of scale, - if the population of a city doubles, its infrastructure needs to only increase by a factor of 1.85. This 15% benefit was true for cities of any size across the world as well as for any measurable infrastructure.
The results were different for socioeconomic measures associated with people, e.g., wages, patents, educational institutions, entertainment, cultural venues. They also scale with population, but instead of following a sublinear .85 scaling factor, socioeconomic attributes scale exponentially, with a superlinear factor of 1.15. That means that if you double the population of a city, there will be a roughly 15% increase in productivity, wages, entertainment and educational institutions, and so on. The exponential scaling of these positive socioeconomic measures makes cities even more attractive to talented people which in turn reinforces their appeal, leading to network effects and the rise of superstars cities.
“However, some bad and ugly come with it,” said Dr. Fox. “And the bad and ugly are things like a systematic increase in crime and various diseases, like AIDS, flu and so on.” These serious negative problems scale at the same 15% as the cities’ attractive qualities. Which brings us to Covid-19.
“The Covid-19 pandemic creates such uncertainty because it strikes at the heart of our urban world,” wrote Harvard economist Edward Glaeser in a recent article, - Cities and Pandemics Have a Long History. Glaeser’s article recounts some of this long history:
- in 430 BC the plague of Athens killed tens of thousands including its prominent leader Pericles, contributing to Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and its eclipse as the center of the ancient Mediterranean civilization;
- in 541 AD the plague of Justinian struck Constantinople, killing a fifth of its population and ending emperor Justinian’s attempt to rebuild the glory of Roman empire;
- in 1347 the flea-borne Black Death slaughtered 100-200 million people in Europe, the Near East and North Africa, with cities being particularly vulnerable to the spread of the disease; and
- in 1918 the Spanish flu infected around 500 million people, - about a third of the world’s population at the time, - and killed an estimated 50 million around the world.
“Only in the past century have cities ceased to be killing fields,” said Glaeser. For one hundred years, cities, - especially those in more advanced economies, - have not suffered a major pandemic. Covid-19 is like a biblical reminder that, - despite all the scientific, technological, and medical advances of the past century, - our increasingly crowded cities are once more at the mercy of a pandemic.
What’s next? How will Covid-19 transform urban life? Opinions abound, but it’s still too early to tell. In How Life in Our Cities Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic, Foreign Policy asked 12 leading urban planning experts, including professors Florida and Glaeser, for their predictions. Let me briefly summarize a few of their key points.
Richard Florida remains optimistic. “Predictions of the death of cities always follow shocks like this one. But urbanization has always been a greater force than infectious disease… Some aspects of our cities and metropolitan areas will be reshaped… a desire for safer, more private surroundings may pull some toward the suburbs and rural areas. Families with children and the vulnerable, in particular, may trade their city apartments for a house with a backyard. But other forces will push people back toward the great urban centers… Great cities will survive the coronavirus.”
Edward Glaeser warns of potential economic consequences. “In the United States alone, 32 million jobs are in retail, leisure, and hospitality. They are on the front lines of the pandemic… If pandemics become the new normal, then tens of millions of urban service jobs will disappear. The only chance to prevent this labor market Armageddon is to invest billions of dollars intelligently in anti-pandemic health care infrastructure so that this terrible outbreak can remain a one-time aberration.”
Georgetown professor Rebecca Katz wonders if “Now that so many of us have created new routines working remotely via countless Zoom teleconferences, we may start to see an exodus from the city to more rural environments.” Maybe the decline of cities some predicted in the 1990s will finally come to pass given our significantly more advanced digital infrastructures. “While it is impossible to predict what the new normal will be, it may well be reverse urbanization,” adds Katz. “Yet we also fully expect that municipal leaders will excel at disease preparedness and response. What was once an underfunded, understaffed area of health departments will become more robust. We will develop best practices for protecting population health in cities, which will help keep urban environments attractive.”
Finally, former NYC deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff makes a strong argument for taking this opportunity to build better cities. “Cities will come back stronger than ever after the pandemic. But when they do, it will be driven by a new model of growth that emphasizes inclusivity, sustainability, and economic opportunity… Reviving urban population growth after the pandemic will start with restoring confidence in urban public health and in the safety of dense living. But when people do return to cities - as they always have in the past - we must leverage new policies and technologies to make urban life more affordable and sustainable for more people.”
Comments