‘We can’t underestimate the impact of unprocessed trauma on our cities’

When it comes to predicting what lies ahead for our global cities post-pandemic, Greg Lindsay is well placed to comment. Both an urbanist and a futurist, the Montreal-based analyst spends his days researching and questioning trends around mobility and city development. He reveals what we are likely to see as urban hubs recalibrate in the wake of Covid-19. “We can’t underestimate the impact of unprocessed trauma” he says. “The mass death event we have all been through is going to have repercussions on cities for years to come.” Lindsay predicts that a global mental health crisis is following hot on the heels of the pandemic. A crisis that can, and arguably should, be addressed by cities through a greater emphasis on public services and public realm. How we design for care and recovery, he says, is something every city should be asking itself because, done right, this could be a valuable step towards a return to the hubbub that characterises the world’s urban centres. From a rethinking of transport networks and the use of technology to ease congestion to anchoring new development around F&B and sociable spaces to bring people together, much can be done. Here, he explains more. EG: You are concerned about a wide-reaching mental health crisis following on from the pandemic. What can be done within cities to tackle this head on? GL: A renewed focus on public realm and development anchored around sociable spaces are top of the list. The cities that seemed to be best prepared for the pandemic were those that, as the saying goes, turned to the ideas that were already lying around on the ground at the time. In Paris, for example, planners closed the streets to traffic to allow for social distancing, to create a more attractive urban core with more cycling and walking. And this sort of approach is starting to show up in upcoming real estate projects. It used to be that you had mixed-use projects with offices at the core, because workplace was the big focus at the time. Then you would surround it with residential and retail. Now you are seeing projects where the cores are effectively F&B concepts, because we recognise that, post-pandemic, people just want to be around other people. You can work from anywhere, you can shop from anywhere, but building sociable spaces, both public and private, will be a big new growth industry. EG: What about creating more walkable/cyclable, user-friendly cities and districts? EDGE Technologies famously had the majority of its workforce back into their Amsterdam-based offices by May 2020 after the first lockdown because the city does not rely as heavily as many others do on public transport. Is this the time to really double down on the 15-minute city concept? GL: This idea of the 15-minute city is a beautiful, beautiful dream. But the concept of trying to adopt an archipelago of neighbourhoods that we walk and cycle between is something that the majority of major Western cities can’t actually achieve for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is a lack of suitable housing and spatial inequality. It is impossible to live in a 15-minute city when the workers who serve you the coffee you walked 10 minutes to get have had to commute in from the urban periphery. We certainly haven’t built the housing required for them to live in the centre of Paris, New York or London. EG: So, what would you say to people who are happy to return to cities and offices but are still concerned about using public transport? GL: I would say that the demonisation of public transit has been such an unfortunate own goal for cities. Obviously, the public transport systems that have been set up to deliver people to urban centres for work at peak times are being used less now that more people are working from home. But for large cities to function, you still need to have that truly regional scale of mass transit. It will just need to be rethought as patterns of mobility change. Switching from commuter rail patterns to all-day services that connect to multiple urban centres could be a great way to get people moving around and into cities again. I know there is a plan in New York, for example, to resurrect disused rail lines to connect Queens, Brooklyn and ultimately the Bronx, bypassing Manhattan because there is a recognition that people live and work within the city but outside the city core. EG: What would you say is the single most important element required to get cities back to the levels of hustle, bustle and occupancy they were pre-Covid? GL: One of my catchphrases during the pandemic was “housing is everything”. It became everything in the sense that everything was absorbed into housing. We worked from home if we could, packages were delivered to our homes, we shopped from home. Our homes had to absorb every single function. Stay-at-home orders also underscored the fact that there are those of us who are privileged to have shelter, and those who had too little of it left cities for other places. We now have an opportunity to rethink how we build housing and where we build it. We should be focusing on the more resilient areas of the UK, the US and other regions around the world, and we need to have a much longer, broader conversation about all of the housing that was never built over the past few decades because of our policy choices to preserve it as a scarcer good. To send feedback, e-mail emily.wright@eg.co.uk or tweet @EmilyW_9 or @EGPropertyNews