The future of "cities" is not just a question for people in New York or LA.
Jason Segedy is a transportation planner based in Akron, Ohio who blogs at Notes from the Underground. A recent post entitled “What Does Our Current Moment Mean for Cities in the Longer-Term?” is a hard but necessary read for anyone who is thinking about the big questions that will impact the future of cities. He writes:
It’s not just the big cities that are feeling dramatic shocks from this pandemic. Places like Bozeman, MT need to gear up for the long-term consequences, too. (Photo by Johnny Sanphillippo)
I continue to believe that the economic devastation from all of this is going to be widespread and long-lasting; that it will likely lead to an economic depression that will be with us for much of this decade; and that this is something that most people still have not yet been able to wrap their heads around.
Yet, for all of that, I am even more concerned about the deep and intractable cultural divides in our country. Ongoing civil unrest, unprecedented political dysfunction, and an unfortunate, but completely rational, erosion of trust in what have demonstrated themselves to be out-of-touch and incompetent bedrock institutions has been a truly frightening thing to behold. For the first time in my life, I believe that it is possible that the United States could soon cease to remain a federal republic and/or a functioning liberal democracy.
The economic hardship, social unrest, and institutional dysfunction is sure to outlast and be far more disruptive and damaging than the virus itself.
Jason stresses that the future of “cities” is about a lot more than New York or San Francisco, and that places big and small need to seriously contemplate their future outlook. Municipal finances will suffer over the long term and cities of all sizes will struggle:
A lot of these discussions about the future of individual cities like New York or Seattle occur in a vacuum that ignores the larger geographic and cultural context of the United States. This is an absolutely gigantic country. It has more lifestyle and living options available than any other place on earth. It also has a highly mobile population, particularly at the upper-end of the socioconomic scale, with a long cultural tradition of unhesitatingly abandoning once place and moving to another when that first place is no longer working out. There is no such thing as a city that is too big or important to fail.
If you think that there is any large, prosperous place in this country that is immune from significant decline, particularly in the face of simultaneous and severe economic disruption, public disorder, and an ongoing loss of civic trust in basic institutions, you are engaging in wishful thinking.
It’s not all doom-and-gloom though. Segedy ends his post with some words of advice for elected officials and community leaders about how they might begin to restore the social fabric and rebuild trust in civic institutions—a crucial part of any path toward recovery:
As widespread social and economic instability continues (and it will), more and more people are going to be looking for community, social trust, public order, and, above all, because it is so woefully lacking across virtually every basic institution right now, basic competence. These are things that, all other things being equal, at least some small and medium-sized communities might be in a better position to provide…
(Top photo by Ma Joseph)