Why Cities are the Best Place to Stay during the Pandemic?
Schools, shops, restaurants, and cafes remain closed. Bus operators drive the usual routes but with empty vehicles. The city has turned into a still life painting. But its key sectors — the essential services — keep functioning.
How are denser cores’ more efficient to cope with pandemics? In compact cities, distances are shorter. Access to well-equipped hospitals and medical centers is easier. Also, according to recent research, a 1% increase in density lowers the costs of providing local services — such as healthcare — by 14.4%. Furthermore, denser urban areas gather talented doctors with diverse specializations. The health system is not an exception.
In cities, talent-rich labor markets, we can get resources and services of any type. Cities are the centers of economic expansion. Cities are primary economic organs.
Cities are Primary Economic Organs
Jane Jacobs, in The Economy of Cities, refutes the still largely accepted idea of agriculture leading to cities. The tale has been inconsistent since long ago. Back in the 18th century, Adam Smith explained the English economic superiority with its greater industry and commerce developments. Still, the Father of Economics didn’t infer that the city industry and commerce preceded agriculture.
Perceiving cities as a result of agriculture can get us to wrong conclusions. For example, we could erroneously say that urban settlements are bigger rural spaces. But, besides its highest population and a presumably larger land area, in cities many and complex processes take place. It is where innovation originates. Following Jacobs, urban centers grow by adding new work to the old one. Thus, not only cities can export more products and services but they can also replace imports. As exports increase and imports are replaced, the economic activities multiply and diversify. An ever-increasing number of population density — related to job creation — is a direct result of cities’ economic expansion.
The Pandemic and the Poverty in the City
Considering the virus spread easily during pandemics, large concentrations of people seem inconvenient. That doesn’t mean that cities’ high density of population is a threat. It’s quite the opposite.
Few hours before the quarantine would officially begin in Buenos Aires, a bunch of affluent inhabitants fled to suburbia. They intended to confine to their vacation homes. There, they’d be away from urban masses and with enough room to keep a safe distance from one another. At least, such was their reasoning.
Suburbs are less densely populated. Also, compared to urban centers, there are fewer shared places and services. For instance, think of suburban shopping squares and city downtowns. The same goes for transit. In the suburbs, there aren’t as many bus lines as in the city. With fewer prone to crowds areas, suburbs are best to practice social distancing.
But let’s dig deeper.
Is the whole city a place of the condemned, where living through a pandemic is unattainable? The scenario is dangerous and all citizens are potential victims. But not everyone is equally exposed to that threat. Some areas are more vulnerable than others, e.g., low-income districts and slums. The access to clean water and sanitation supplies are limited and the houses are overcrowded.
Connecting poverty with diseases is not novel. Early in the 20th century, American philanthropists explained poverty as a consequence of poor health. Not only the statement was false. It also led to dangerous and mistaken inferences. Only healthy people were thought to be productive. Hence, those suffering from any illness, unable to help themselves, would be even poorer and sicker. The strategies to address the problem were just as defective as the reasoning. Efforts were focused on fighting disease, not poverty. So, the number of poor people didn’t decrease. What’s more, another fake and vicious cycle arose: poverty-overpopulation-poverty.
Rather than looking into the origin of poverty, Jacobs suggests concentrating on prosperity. Healing the poor would only patch the problem up. Such an investment would treat disease among poor people but wouldn’t solve poverty. This way of proceeding will need further investment sooner or later. The same goes for better city planning in places like slums. Improving sanitation wouldn’t solve poverty; it would enhance specific housing conditions.
‘Poverty has no causes, only prosperity has causes,’ Jane Jacobs writes. In this way, the author suggests economic development as an efficient move. Healing poor people’s diseases or improving their housing conditions are makeshifts solutions. Both conceive high density as an obstacle. But Jacobs’ approach — economic development — perceives the city’s large population as an asset. Indeed, developing economies need a growing number of workers.
Coping with the Pandemic
The COVID-19 outbreak started, as published in the medical journal The Lancet, in China’s Hubei province. That’s 7,479 miles from New York and 5,276 miles from Lombardy — United States and Italy’s most affected areas respectively. As it spread to all continents, and it affected 177 countries by the end of March 2020, it was declared a pandemic. However, the question of whether this coronavirus is an urban or rural problem still stands.
Once a pandemic is declared, thinking of a place to stay safe — other than home — is useless. Instead, a compelling question would be: Which is the most accurate place to cope with the disease? Cities are definitely better supplied to respond to an outbreak. Its labor market attracts the best professionals, including health workers. Also, due to metropolitan areas compactness and high population density, there is a bigger medical infrastructure. This facilitates early diagnosis and secures herd immunity.
The significant increase in wage disparities is the flip side of denser cities. The benefits of large populations don’t fall on everyone equally. Cities’ inequity affects a wide variety of groups: renters struggling with payments, workers that can’t afford to live near their jobs, and families in informal settlements. Although a pandemic destabilizes the medical system of any city, the repercussions are not the same for everyone. No provisional program targeting those living in the most challenging conditions will solve the problem deep-rootedly. Rather than healthy but still poor people, an economic development plan will aim to tackle poverty.