23: Slowdown landscapes: Flattening the curve on the city centre
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Covid 19, Urbanism, Work, Retail, Cities

Those ‘NYC is dead forever. Here’s why’ articles I referred to earlier tend to carelessly overplay the number of people that can work from home, or even have the freedom to choose their work and how it happens. Yet they do at least point out the significant shift for those that do have such choices: that key communications technologies have now, finally combined to produce great flexibility over where work happens, as we’ll see. This pattern has been growing for decades, with some towns and regions increasingly oriented around work-from-home dynamics.

That shift from the city is a fact, and the rapid acceleration of this movement will destablise sector after sector (which in the case of highly inequitable and carbon-intensive real estate and mobility sectors, may be highly positive outcomes.)

But equally, the fluidity of space and work within the city is also a fact. Cities are eternally attractive confections which technology has only tended to reinforce, whether the elevator, automobile, or internet. There will be a drift from the city, but does not mean the city itself—as a thing, as a place, as a construct—is under threat at all. It may be smaller, lesser, slower in some places that have recently been sprawling, self-important and carelessly rapid—but I’ll suggest that it may be no bad thing to move on from the delirious machismo that has tended to produce inequality over broader equity.

Yet the city itself remains eternal. The city is what humanity does—our story is largely that of a slow, 20,000 year drift towards urbanisation—and it remains perhaps our greatest invention. Neither the pandemic, nor the greater biodiversity crisis it is part of, will change that.

“The city is a complex but incomplete system, and therein lies its capacity to continue inventing itself over the course of the centuries, to capture momentary histories, outsurviving kingdoms, governments, or powerful companies. Nothing in our history has lasted as long as the city.” — Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen has written of the three particular qualities of the city that make it resilient—what she sometimes refers to as its speech: “Cities are complex systems. But they are incomplete systems. In this incompleteness lies the possibility of making.”

Each of these—complex, incomplete, making—is hardly lessened by the pandemic; arguably, they are strengthened. The hollowing out of cities produces a sense of incompleteness, which offers up new possibilities for making. We see this condition in proto-Slowdown cities like Detroit and Venice and Tokyo, for instance, perhaps even more than in Dorling’s set of Ottawa, Helsinki, Stockholm et al. These cities are more incomplete, perhaps. In that condition, there is indeed possibility. But an incomplete existence

Yet what the city is may indeed be transforming around us. Technologies are at the heart of this change, but as with buildings (which are also technology), they are merely channelling deeper patterns in our cultures, our structures of feeling.

A week after the iPad arrived, a decade ago, I wrote about how its impact might not be in being a ‘third’ product in-between iPhone and laptop, but instead in being a product for ‘third places’: “Its form factor and service model is defined for in-between spaces. Although it will float around the home and the office perfectly well, it comes into its own in these third spaces in a way that that phone and laptop cannot, being either too small or too large respectively.”

The mobile hardware advances since then have been little short of extraordinary, and whilst Craig Mod affirms this by rightly pointing out that software still has to catch up, the layers of communications software laid down on top of increasingly fast, reliable and widespread broadband have finally begun to transform where work happens—just as previous technologies like the train, bus, and car have. The iPad is an example of a technology that reinforces city-based work and culture. Yet other communications technologies now stretch out work to a thin skein such that much of it can be located almost anywhere. We have both dimensions of technology in play at the same time, which means our notions of which spaces we could live and work in become more fluid than ever, at least technically (economically being another matter.) These communications technologies could make city living and working optional, partial, or highly variable.

There’s a corner of Manchester, in Castlefield, where multiple railway bridges and viaducts criss-cross the curving canals laid down only a century earlier. Threaded through these intersections are later layers of roads and telecoms cables. Finally of course, invisible wireless signals are immersed throughout. Layer upon layer of communications infrastructure, from several centuries, pragmatically sandwiched in a few hundred square metres, each converging on the few key nodes in flows and networks that cities are constructed around.

Our cities have been shaped by these tangles of communications technologies, perhaps than anything. They embody the city, its convergence of interactions, its complexity, its incompleteness and the acts of making it necessitates. Contemporary communications technologies, just as with earlier communications technologies like offices, streets, and libraries, most clearly exert and exemplify what we stand for. Yet now they allow a generous loosening of these ties, a fundamental unravelling of these networks. Interactions can slip and slide over a much broader, wider range of spaces and places.

Cities persist; they always have. Humans are social animals. We are drawn to conviviality like cheetah to a waterhole, and we are particularly enamoured of the urban spaces, places, and conditions that engender such impossibly diverse variations on conviviality.

There need be no particular rejection of the idea of density as a positive condition, either. One of the many misleading and unhelpful statements that Governor Cuomo made early in the crisis (though not as ultimately harmful as his Emerson Lake and Palmer-inspired approach to tech-billionaire-driven future city strategy development) was to suggest the easy correlation between the spread of the virus and urban density.

I discussed that in Paper 6: A language in crisis back in early April, noting that it didn’t seem to be the case at all. That position has held up to ongoing examination, so far. Research is now stating that there is no such correlation, and that the virus has spread as easily in a rural, exurban or suburban context as it has in a dense urban environment.

The questions may concern the form of density, and the distribution of that density. That doesn’t question the idea of the city, but it does pose questions as to what form it takes, and a more coherent approach to what happens in the spaces around cities. These questions are due to pre-crisis emerging conditions in technology and culture, rather more than Covid-19; although as usual, the attention-seeking virus has put the cat on the table.

We don’t yet know the impact of this new slippage, this ability to initiate and encounter such conviviality through physical, contemporaneous, spatial interactions, but then nurture and develop that ongoing relationship by stretching it over space and time via tech. This flexing of experience back and forth is rather more radical than the previous tech’s version: the commute from the suburbs to the CBD for nine, and then back again at five.

Something else is emerging here: perhaps this polynodal pattern wherein the mono-functional city centre is diminished and the distributed neighbourhood is heightened and diversified. Then, in an almost fractal shift of scale, the relationship between city and region is similarly rebalanced; both continue to exist, yet the emphasis slides around more fluidly, now that interactions are partially unmoored from those old nodes in networks, the necessarily physical and real-time criss-cross of infrastructure in that old centre of Manchester. These new patterns may well play out; how it plays out will reflect our broader culture, our values, what we stand for.