The Pandemic Has Revealed How Vulnerable Our Cities Truly Are
By: Max Ufberg
Tags: Cities, Society, Culture, Urban Development, Pandemic

There’s perhaps no better time than now to read Metropolis, historian Ben Wilson’s new book about global urban development and the cosmopolitan existence. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic prompted many to flee cities for greener pastures, metropolitan migration had been stagnating. That’s a shame, Wilson argues, because cities offer the best of humanity: the bustle, the culture, the community. Looking at 26 different cities across the world, Wilson offers a sprawling account that acts as a showcase for the ingenuity that thrives in our skyscrapered incubators.

GEN spoke with Wilson about his inspiration to write the book and how the coronavirus reveals the empty husks our city centers have become.

GEN: How do you approach a subject as broad as what you’ve written about?

Ben Wilson: I started with what I saw at the time as the most exciting city—Shanghai. You could almost tell a history of the world through Shanghai from the 1850s until now. But then I got interested in the idea of global cities in general, and my curiosity took me to do the whole story of cities and to look at them through different angles than their histories.

You traveled all over the world to write this book. What surprised you the most during the course of your travels?

What struck me about a lot of cities is the way they’re becoming quite alike—or they were before 2020. Wherever there’s a fast-growing and developing city — Lagos, Mumbai, Singapore, Shanghai — there are bits of it that are very similar. There’s a sort of sameness to global cities, especially in their richer districts. That comes from Shanghai, this skyscrapering of the world over the past 20 years.

That makes sense, given that we’re seeing a general “Airbnbification” all across the world.

Everyone tries to create this similar backdrop to their city: You have coffee bars, cuisine, shopping experiences. Places like Amsterdam are really kicking back against the Airbnbification of their city to try and limit it.

One of the biggest forces to shape cities over the past 150 years is the beginning of mass tourism. You have vast transient populations who occupy the center of a city, which over the course of a year is bigger than the resident population. I learned that if you want to look at a real city, you don’t go to the center of the city — that’s become quite artificial. There are bits outside the center where you get the most interesting things going on. What would have been the bohemian center of a city has been priced out.

And look at what’s happened to so many city centers during this pandemic.

What’s going on now with Covid-19 and the collapse of commuting exposes a lot of city centers as being not very resilient places. They’re very concentrated on certain types of activity, and when they’re emptied out, they become ghost towns. Covid-19 shows a trend that’s been going on for a long time: the hollowing out of the creative center of cities.

But these centers might change. We might find that a central business district just can’t support the amount of office space it has and becomes residential again. We’re living through a moment where we can rethink what cities are for.

Does this happen a lot? In the past, have natural disasters forced us to reconsider our cities in this way?

One example might be the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It didn’t just transform Chicago, but the whole of American urbanism, because there’s now a center of the city that is covered by fire regulations and another part of the city where people want to build their wooden houses again. Chicago became quickly dominated by a business core, which within a decade or so started sprouting skyscrapers. The fire also displaced people toward the city limits and beyond, creating rings of different wealth. You get a business district surrounded by very poor areas and then radiating out to richer areas.

In the book, you make the case that, given our climate crisis, we need more urbanization. But that’s an especially hard sell right now, during a pandemic.

Climate change is definitely the biggest threat facing us today. And what’s fascinating over the past 20 or 30 years is the way the environmental movement has accepted that cities offer a more sustainable way of living, and if they’re managed rightly, a huge amount of biodiversity.

A sensible policy of densification maximizes the quality of life in cities if it’s done well; densification has to become a policy in the age of climate crisis, as it is the most sustainable way of living. But sadly, density is counter to the fear that we’re all living through in this pandemic, so it becomes an enemy.

In America, our politicians don’t seem particularly mindful of the benefits of urban density.

No. America’s different because suburbanization is woven into the way of life; your politics and your economy are very much bound up with suburbia. And politicians would pay a large price, I suspect, for undermining that ethos.

The tendency to sprawl is so hardwired into all of us—to want to escape a city but still enjoy its amenities. You find cities everywhere in the world following what America did in the 20th century, expanding much quicker than population growth. There are so many hidden costs in the suburbs; they’re so massively subsidized by the federal government in providing the roads. If those costs ever became apparent to the consumer, it would be a much less attractive proposition.

At the end of the day, what makes a city successful is its resilience — having a mix of uses, a mix of services, a sense of community. And if we want to have more resilient neighborhoods, that’s a very good model how to do it: Take the best of the urban and inject it into all kinds of different neighborhoods.

Which, as you mention in the book, doesn’t bode well for a place like Los Angeles, given that it’s such a hodgepodge of different neighborhoods with little overarching structure.

No, which is sad, because it was built around public transport. It was built around the streetcar.

Los Angeles is a very interesting city; every neighborhood bears the trace of history. The neighborhoods have quite distinct identities — cities within cities.

You tout Tokyo as an example of a successfully decentralized metropolis.

Tokyo is a very good example because it was destroyed in 1923 by an enormous earthquake, and it was destroyed again in 1945 by bombing. Tokyo was built back neighborhood by neighborhood, and there has always been this very strong sense of resilience, that building was a local community thing. Within 20 or so years of being flattened, it became one of the great metropolises of the late 20th century.

I found it interesting that the energy to rebuild Tokyo came from the people rather than from the government. You see this in other cities, like Medellín in Colombia, and cities in Indonesia, where there’s a partnership between the informal, jerry-built part of the city and the central government. I was taken by the idea of messiness. I saw those examples as being very pertinent for fast-growing cities in Africa and Asia.

It strikes me a very different idea for development than what we see in the United States.

In the West, we’re used to zoning. You have residential that’s separated from industry, that’s separated from retail, that’s separated from finance. When you jumble those things up, you get a very resilient city like Tokyo, which is able to absorb huge amounts of shocks and then carry on.

It’s striking that a place like Dharavi in Mumbai, which is one of the most densely populated and poorest places on planet Earth, was able to deal with Covid-19 incredibly well as a community-based problem. The same is true of the favelas in Brazil; they’ve managed to police Covid-19 in a fairly successful way. At the heart of it is the way communities are empowered to make decisions at a grassroots level.

But cities can’t just take from grassroots—it has to be a bidirectional process. You can’t just steal the best and then try to impose your idea of order on the other parts of the city.