20. Wait, what?
By: Dan Hill
Tags: History, Politics, Covid-19, BlackLivesMatter, Wildfires

It seems as if the entire concept of what Éric Charmes and Max Rousseau call ‘planetary urbanization’ is placed in question at various points between April and August 2020. In their article for Public Books/La Vie des Idées, ‘It’s the geography stupid! Planetary urbanization revealed’, Charmes and Rousseau pick apart how zoonotic diseases are initiated to over-development, and then transported over optimised globalised trade networks. A simple observation provokes vertiginous shifts of scale: they note that 800 years ago the Black Death took 15 years to travel the Silk Road to reach Europe, whereas COVID-19 will have taken about 15 hours.

We can pick apart the absurdity of this in many ways. As Charmes and Rousseau implicitly suggest, it is both wondrous and woeful at once that “the residents of an average French city may employ the local plumber, but, at the same time, they eat meat from animals fed on Latin American soybean, watch television on Korean screens, or use Algerian petrol.” Or, more pertinently, how the virus itself travels with much the same fluidity. Reading passages like the following, it’s as if gossamer threads pulled across Calvino’s imaginary cities were barely imaginary enough to capture the reality of what we have built.

“International exchanges have become more complex and multi-scalar, in the sense that it is not France that has come into contact with China. Instead, the Contamines-Montjoie ski resort (one of the main initial clusters of the virus in France) found itself connected to a forest in Hubei via an English tourist returning from a conference in Singapore, where he had met other Chinese executives, one of whom may have dined with a doctor friend, who works in a hospital in Wuhan.”—Éric Charmes and Max Rousseau, ‘It’s the geography stupid! Planetary urbanization revealed’, Public Books/La Vie des Idées, 11 August 2020

In response to this shattering complexity, and with varying levels of effectiveness, nations lock down, or slow down, in order to contain the virus. As many of us have observed, a significant number of these manoeuvres — working and studying from home, moving locally and actively, retrofitting streets, emphasising green and blue spaces, flying less, shopping sustainably or simply consuming less, building care networks — happen to overlap with those required to address the climate crisis. That they happen to is not coincidental of course, further reinforcing that the climate criss and the virus are connected, with the latter merely a particularly virulent and destructive manifestation of the former.

Apparently within days of COVID grounding flights, switching off polluting chimneys, and stopping cars dead, the air cleared over some of most polluted places, waterways clear, wildlife returns to cities. Quickly, some municipalities responded by rushing through street modifications. They used the lulled environment, and the need to keep key workers moving via bike, foot, and limited public transport, in order to retrofit streets far more rapidly than previously planned for.

According to surveys of consumer behaviour, many people began to consume in more responsible fashion, limiting waste, making sustainable choices. Yet any purported increase in conviviality and community resilience is largely lost in the shadow of increases in domestic violence or quickly accumulating mental health and wellbeing issues. And of course the direct and deadly impact of the virus itself.

There are awful ironies hidden within disaster: in Poland’s 36,000 reported infections, about 6,500 are coal miners working in the country’s environment-destroying, heavily-polluting coal industry. The miners are nearly a fifth of all confirmed Polish cases, despite making up only 80,000 of the country’s 38 million people. In Melbourne, going back into lockdown in July having emerged from it in June, Premier Daniel Andrews says “Ultimately we have to take this as seriously as we take bushfire. This is binary. It is life and death.” Yet when he says “I think there’s been complacency and a sense of frustration” we’re not sure whether he’s talking about COVID, or Australia’s own mining industry that helped cause both the bushfires and the climate crisis (Andrews has at least tried to lead a shift towards renewable energy in his state).

As the response to the virus stretched throughout the first half of the year, well beyond the time usually taken to develop new habits, many of these new patterns of habitation may have begun to stick. These behaviour changes could be significant; in terms of emissions, it looked like we may have been close to achieving between a 7% and 17% drop by the end of 2020. At one point, it was the largest drop since the Second World War.

Yet As Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, commented, the drop in emissions “is nothing to celebrate. It is not the result of policy. This decline will be easily erased if the right policy measures are not put in place.”

This is not the ‘just transition’ many are demanding. Far from it. And sure enough, the decline in emissions was indeed temporary, and being erased within a few months.

Given that the hand was forced, what also became quickly clear was that COVID-19 was also exploiting fault lines, just as with the bushfires. Not simply by tracing the globalised trade routes along which previous plagues had been transported, but also the way in which the infrastructure of everyday life had been allowed to become over-extended, fragile, brittle. The virus made quick work of systems optimised around short-term efficiency rather than long term resilience, around profit rather than social justice, and where just-in-time was, it turns out, just-not-in-time when it came to medical supplies and healthcare response.

Initially seen as a ‘great equaliser’, with both prime ministers and nurses catching the virus, COVID-19 turned out to be anything but. We soon discover that African Americans are dying from at almost three times the rate of white people (and in Kansas, black residents are currently dying at seven times the rate of whites.) (That was the information in May 2020. The APM Research project is tracking, ongoing, and finds it currently more than twice the rate, overall.)

“The virus map of the New York boroughs turns redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle-school ratings. Untimely death has rarely been random in these United States. It has usually had a precise physiognomy, location and bottom line. For millions of Americans, it’s always been a war.”

— ‘Intimations’, Zadie Smith (2020)

In Britain, Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority (BAME) groups are twice as likely to die from the virus compared to the general population. Other people also suffer disproportionately, in terms of deaths or tissue damage: those with respiratory illnesses, from living in conditions with poor air quality, due to traffic, or industry; or those with other chronic illnesses, due to other forms of structural inequality in our systems of living. This, too, presages the patterns of the climate crisis. Amir Jina, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, points out that the impact of climate crisis is “eerily similar to Covid — vulnerable people are those who have pre-existing or underlying conditions.” In slum conditions the virus thrives; as Delhi-resident Anita Aggrawal puts it, interviewed by Amrit Dhillon: “You can’t protect yourself against the virus when you share the same toilet with 50 families.”

The sheer lack of care in our environment, in our politics, is made clearer than ever. This will clearly wreak far greater havoc in the battle beyond the virus, beyond flattening this initial curve, as we move into the bigger curves to come. As many said over the Northern summer, “enough is enough”.

And so to the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd (and then Rayshard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and thousands more). These extraordinary events, aligning people everywhere all over the world in protests against systemic racism, played out on the same streets that COVID-19 had largely cleared a few weeks before. New forms of urbanism are far from the point of the protests, yet they arrive nonetheless, in the form of Seattle’s Chapel Hill Autonomous Zone (initially CHAZ, later known as ‘Chop’), a scrappy emergent system which nonetheless works as a sketch of a very different kind of city, or the vast BLACK LIVES MATTER street art adorning streets around the USA, making clear that streets are places of politics, for prototypes of public life.