Did bad city planning make the Covid-19 crisis worse?
Urban growth and densification are key problems to pandemics
For thousands of years, humans have looked to physical space to treat and cure sickness. People have redesigned cities across the history to minimise the risk of infectious disease. Now, with new diseases emerging, like coronavirus with no cures to fight them, one of the most effective solutions is to go back to the physical: social distancing, quarantine and, perhaps, adaptations to our cities and neighbourhoods.
The spatial and density of space is a design problem, as it relates to infectious disease epidemics. If you look around most neighbourhoods in cities, you will see evidence of how humans have responded to infectious disease by redesigning the physical space.
Infectious disease was also one of the drivers of housing reform and the urban renewal era. The cholera outbreaks of the 1830s led to better sanitation in London. Cities like Paris has also been promoting a “quarter-hour city” to reduce pollution and improve the quality of life. Planners should focus on building “20-minute cities”, or villages within the city, where one can get to their job, the doctor or their friends all within 20 minutes to minimise the impact of pandemics and urban density.
But now, with no medicine available to treat emerging infectious diseases, like the COVID-19 pandemic, using space as a way to address epidemics has renewed interest. With more than two-thirds of the global population forecast to live in urban areas by 2050, cities need to be designed for good health. While urban living offers prospects of better economic opportunities and infrastructure, including healthcare facilities, the way cities densify and expand plays a huge role in the spread of infectious diseases.
We need to understand the landscapes of emerging extended urbanisation better if we want to predict, avoid and react to emerging disease outbreaks more efficiently. Rapid urbanisation and density enable the spread of infectious disease. Social distancing is the appropriate response in the presence of a novel disease.
What stops such areas from becoming overcrowded environments where disease transmission can be high is the availability of good quality physical infrastructure, with planning standards that promote liveability.
Maybe, it’s a bit early to take on lessons learned from COVID-19, but there is a big conversation about the value vs. the risks of densification. Clearly densification is and has been the problem with some of this. COVID-19 puts a fundamental challenge to how we manage urbanisation. To some certain extent, rethinking density management is the key for long-term survival in a pandemic world.
