Janan Ganesh reports in the Financial Times:
There are two contrasting futures for urban life after the coronavirus. In the sanguine version, people liberated from their homes re-form the great mass that has been shooed from the streets. A century after the Roaring Twenties, we have another. In another future, people never regain their trust in random contact. A generation of restaurateurs go out of business, and the next one balks at the risk. A lockdown infused with Blitz spirit sours into a generational turn against the city. Worse fates can befall a neighbourhood than gentrification. Cities count on animal spirits as much as tangible infrastructure.
A friend moves into the 45th floor of a slick and shimmering tower in London’s Isle of Dogs. Up there, savouring bachelorhood in the heavens, watching pilots brave the steep glide path to City airport, it is unthinkable that his new neighbourhood served as a war zone within his lifetime. And here I do not resort to lurid tabloid metaphor. Stanley Kubrick used the rusting desolation of the 1980s Docklands to shoot Full Metal Jacket. Try our newsletter on Sustainable Business Free four-week trial of the Moral Money newsletter Get the newsletter Because the resurgence of cities has been so stunning, what came before has passed into something more like rumour than history. The depopulation, the suburb as The Future, the fact that “inner city” was not an accolade: these realities of mid-century life take some believing now. What might persuade us is the regression of our swaggering cities into that forgotten gloom all over again. It could happen. There are two contrasting futures for urban life after the coronavirus. In the sanguine version, people liberated from their homes re-form the great pullulating mass that has been shooed from the streets and sequestered of late. A century after the Roaring Twenties, we have another. You need not have a bleak cast of mind to entertain another future, though. In this one, a meaningful number of people never regain their trust in random contact. (A driver from whom I collected a meal this week dodged my hand like Sugar Ray Leonard.) Scarring memories of illness and loss push even zealous urbanists to think again. A generation of restaurateurs go out of business, and what should have been the next one balks at the risk. What starts as a transient lockdown, infused with Blitz spirit, sours into a generational turn against the city. A certain kind of commentator learns the hard way that worse fates can befall a neighbourhood than gentrification. An implausible destiny, I know, but then so was the last great downswing for cities. Imagine telling a prewar Londoner, one of almost 9m, that a lifetime would pass before the population neared that mark again. What caused the shrinkage of this and other cities was, inter alia, fear: of crime, of pollution. Cities count on animal spirits as much as tangible infrastructure. Sure enough, their repopulation since the 1980s has more or less tracked the pan-western fall in crime and the clean-up of the skies. It is no great leap to see contagion as the new city-voiding dread, as I thought terrorism was going to be during the grimmest moments of the last decade. Almost overnight, ‘network effects’ has a sinister ring. As for ‘openness’, to what, exactly? Perhaps an anti-urban turn is most due in America, where the case for density must be made anew every generation, against space as a birthright, against a Jeffersonian reverence for the pastoral. (Europeans, more numerous but in no larger a land mass, have less choice in the matter.) There is no chance of a metropolitan exodus, to be clear, so much as just gradual decline. The trouble is that there is no “just” about it. The material implications are serious. One of the few things that unites economists is an enthusiasm for cities. Something about their openness, network effects and efficiencies of scale spurs growth, even when they are heinously run. You need not even live in them to profit from their fiscal surplus. This week, I was moved to rewatch Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, and remain struck by its false notes as well as its sumptuousness. Besides the objectification of the lead boy, which is cruder than Thomas Mann intended, the film does not quite honour the book’s xenophobic sub-theme. The cholera that haunts the city is of eastern origin, after all. The novella even alludes to the wages of diversity. It is ancient, this idea that what enriches cities also imperils them, as though they almost ask for their periodic tragedies. Anti-urbanism of this kind has for some decades now toiled on the losing side of history. Cities have boomed in all continents. As of 2007, most of humanity lives in them. I look forward to a future in which all of this continues. I just no longer count on it.
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