Penn Pandemic Diary, Urbanization Penn Pandemic Diary, Entry #39: Three Problems with the COVID-19 Urban Density Debate

Marianne F. Potvin was a 2019-20 Postdoctoral Fellow at Perry World House.

Pandemics and urbanism have always been tightly intertwined. Cities are not just primary sites of disease exposure and containment, they are instruments of intervention in and of themselves. As someone who researches at the intersection of urban studies and disaster studies, I was therefore only partially surprised by how quickly the COVID-19 pandemic revived the age-old debate about the viability of cities.

Given the early-day prevalence of COVID-19 cases in dense urban centers like New York City, the knee-jerk reaction for many has been to predict the impending doom of large cities, framing the outbreak as an intrinsic flaw of urban density. In this most recent version, the forecast is that greater risks of disease transmission in cities will prompt a digital-age urban-exodus – a reversal of the rural flight that occurred during the industrial revolution – also enabled by technological advances.

While debating urban density remains important, especially in the context of green growth strategies and environmental sustainability, this high-level, technologically deterministic framing is emblematic of contemporary approaches to crises, urban or otherwise, and is flawed for the following three reasons.

The first problem is that the commentators forecasting the death of cities appear to be oblivious to their own positionality. Envisioning the possibility of a digitally-enabled urban exodus requires occupying a certain position of privilege. In other words, large scale urban flight is fathomable primarily to those on the “right side” of the digital divide – i.e. those who can take advantage of remote work technology from the safety of their well-connected homes, or better yet, bucolic country houses.

A second problem has to do with empirics: these panicked calls for de-densification are simply not supported by data. Geospatial analyses of the links between urban density and COVID-19 incidences, in New York City for example, are already showing that disease prevalence does not correlate with physical density, but rather with income. In a similar vein, recent psychologically informed urban research, which invalidates assumed links between hygiene concerns and attitudes towards urban density, encourages us to develop a more comprehensive way of thinking about density.

A third and more important flaw is that these meta-speculations about urban exodus decenter more pressing urban justice debates, such as how planners should address eviction, homelessness, citizenship, or access to basic urban services (schools, public transport, healthcare). These are the thorny urban planning topics that actually matter for the vast majority of city dwellers who do not have the luxury to disperse to greener pastures.

So far, it is mostly through the Black Lives Matter movement that these questions have received consideration from Western commentators during the pandemic. Even then, the covert racism entrenched in discriminatory urban policies and segregationist housing and zoning laws has not been exposed to the same extent that the overt racism at the core of police brutality has. This is perhaps due to urban planning’s often dull, slow, and bureaucratic nature, which closely relates to the banality of evil – Hannah Arendt’s idea that it is often through the most mundane and thoughtless of practices that evil operates.

In sum, cities are not the problem in the pandemic; unjust, racist and greedy planning policies are. And so are moot debates that obscure the fundamental, value-laden questions that we ought to grapple with as we steer our way through this “crisis.” Critical scholarship on the positionality of those who teach and practice urbanism tends to lose its appeal in times of deeply felt emergencies, to the benefit of so-called objective techno-deterministic ideas or concepts. Despite the fear and uncertainty, it is my hope that our generation’s first-hand experience of a pandemic will rekindle a critical approach to urban justice questions in the public sphere.

The views expressed in the Penn Pandemic Diary are solely the author’s and not those of Penn or Perry World House.