Rethinking Cities - A Brainstorming Session

Rethinking Cities - A Brainstorming Session

If we were doing science fiction conventions this year, this would be a panel idea. We're not.

So instead I'm going to flesh it out somewhat, and give the reader a perspective into the thought processes of a social ecologist along the way.

The parallel between the city and any other organism is straightforward. It is taught in subjects ranging from architecture through zoo design. Less known, but equally studied, is the parallel between an organism and a building.

I'll start small, with that.

Buildings need to 'eat' and 'excrete' liquid and solid wastes. They need to obtain energy. At some point they were built; someday they will be demolished. The nature and number of the occupants creates constraints. So does the surroundings.

If I say 'shopping mall' I describe a particular type of one or more large buildings, containing a lot of stuff, visited by a lot of people. (And giving both police and firefighters nightmares.)

If I then say 'house,' you can imagine anything from a shack in the woods, to a cabin in the forest, to a mega-mansion on a mountaintop.

A city is a collection of buildings, more or less artistic (mostly less), which relate to each other using systems of shocking complexity.

San Francisco in particular is one of my favorite cities. It is a baroque mess, a disaster built on the ruins of disaster, but that is an essential part of her charm. A city of hills and bridges, water brought in from hundreds of miles away, constantly under construction and both tourist dream and resident nightmare.

And we may have to abandon it and start over.

Say what?

We made some fundamental assumptions about the relationship between people and cities. These have been badly broken by Corona-19, and were already shaky due to tons of other factors.

"Social distancing."

Our mass transit systems in particular are designed to crowd people together. Unavoidable, inescapable ... increasingly, unaffordable and incapable of being effectively policed. BART was always a shitshow, even when the cops had license to kill. Take that way, and BART is ironically enough even more dangerous. Multiply by VTA, MUNI, AC Transit, the other bus systems out there.

We can solve the bus problem with new rolling stock. Imagine a bus made of exterior compartments, each cubby with its own boarding door.

We can't solve the BART problem. Even the most aggressive cleaning can't keep up with respiratory droplets.

"Urban shopping."

People in America are so steeped in the car culture that it's an extra effort to imagine how one would live without access to an automobile.

I can carry home from the store, what I can carry. I can arrange for package and delivery services, when they work, and they have their own dependencies and problems. (Three years or so from now, I am going to enjoy ripping AMAZON a new one, since my NDA will have expired.)

Now add social distancing and each person's typical health, plus the very real potential of walking past people poorer than you.

"Policing."

It is no accident that the rise of the modern police (as opposed to the vigilantes, the slave patrols, the posse or the sheriff) is coincidental with the rise of the urban city. Troops who didn't usually shoot people were required, and Sir Robert Peel's answer was to take their guns away.

Crowd enough rats together in a maze, and they get cranky. Give boss rats ticket books and sticks, and you can keep a little more order for a time. Take away the boss rats, or cut their cheese (pensions)... yeah.

"Terrorism."

Without going into the kind of operational details useful to the Bad People (TM, SM Stirling), terrorism is largely a factor of how many people you can pack into a square foot, and how you can then efficiently scare or kill them.

No one uses car bombs on rural farms.

"Hazardous materials."

We've had some frightening disasters over the years. But the modern hazmat, like the San Bruno pipeline explosion, is only the tip of the iceberg. We've never really had a nasty nasty urban hazmat since the Bhopal disaster in India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

But we easily could.

"Natural disaster."

We now know from hurricanes and wildfires that when Bad Things (no TM) happen to a city, they tend to be worse than when they happen to towns and villages.

The Army Corps of Engineers had to make some hard decisions when Houston was about to flood. They made their decisions, and some surprisingly rich neighborhoods got flooded when poorer neighborhoods did not.

"Hospitals."

People are getting shocked by going to the ER and discovering that for the best of reasons, it is now a very individual experience. The sick or hurt person is whisked away behind the scenes, and friends and family can wait in the parking lot for news of their fate.

The same with vets, by the way, and for the same reasons.

We might have to literally rebuild every hospital we have. That's not expensive - that's very expensive.

So to wrap up, as this is a brief post:

Cities may be marvelous machines for human living.

But we need to revisit how they are designed and how they function.

And bluntly, they may not be a good idea.

Deck Chairs, Titanic

This is not going to be a numbers post.  Nor is this going to be a statistics post.  This is however going to be a science post, of the hardest possible science (in several senses).

Complex adaptive systems theory, to be specific.

The complexity of a system is a function of the number of inputs, the number of flow paths, and the scarcity of energy in the system.

A forest is not all that complex.  A plain is even less so.

But tundras, deserts and jungles are teeming with all sorts of life ... all knifing each other in the back, because the conditions are austere and the raw amount of energy flow in the system is low.

We are now conducting the biggest social and economic experiment in the history of humanity.  We are shutting down parts of the United States, but not others.

Two hypercities: San Francisco and New York.  One, aggressive quarantine and social distancing.  The other, business as usual for a few weeks longer.

The Big Apple's getting it in the shorts.  The City That Never Sleeps is holding, for the moment.

Social distancing smashes small business, the economic engine and the lifeblood of our societies.  It annihilates tourism and pours ball bearings into the turbine of our economy.

Unchecked spread of COVID-19 pours gasoline over our hospitals and sets them on fire.  Overloaded beds mean that the next car wreck, you die; the next heart attack, you die; the next kid with anaphylaxis who should get a shot and live another fifty years, dies.

Both the people worried about COVID-19 and the people worried about our economy are utterly correct.  Both disasters are entirely possible at the same time.

And don't forget our usual ones -- earthquake, wildfire, tornado, severe weather -- because they're in play too.

If you put too much pressure on a system, you don't get adaptation.  You get collapse.

This is a human body.  There are many like it, but this is the one we are talking about today.

Here is a bacterium.  The body's natural defenses kill it.  Yay.

Here are millions of bacteria.  The body's natural defenses can't cope.  The person goes and gets antibiotics.  They do the trick, yay.

Bacteria, no antibiotics (or ineffective ones) ... the body tries to adapt, to use its natural defenses, and what you get is called 'septic shock.'  Over a course of several hours, the body tries to heat up, compensate, handle its business -- and fails, with body chemistry imbalances, damage to organs, clinical shock and soon, irreversible death.

We are potentially giving our economy the biggest case of 'shock' we've ever seen or dreamed of, in the hopes of preventing a biological shock of either COVID-19 overwhelming our health care system, or the risk that it can mutate to high lethality and take our civilization down at the seams.  2-4% dead doesn't sound like much until you relfect that the average city can barely handle 1%.  Now imagine 20-40% lethality with a mutation.  The living would be unable to bury the dead.

The National Guard is the antibodies of our system.  They are our most flexible resource.

Where are they?

At the food banks.

That's not good.  That's a major warning sign that the food distribution system may break down.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.  Then reject fear and let it turn to resolve.

The next three months are a literal fight for the survival of America.  If we live, we can restore our civil liberties.  But we do have to survive first, and that is now in utterly serious doubt.

What can you do to survive?  Be prepared.  Be ready for anything.  Follow good preparedness guides.  Don't hoard, but do stock up.  Build your skills.  

What can your organization do to survive?  Same answer, bigger scale.  If you do something essential, get really good at it and be ready to keep doing it no matter what you face.  If you don't do something essential, stop fucking off and start doing something essential, right the hell now.

What will we need?

Hundreds of thousands of nurse's assistants, apprentice respiratory technicians and nurses practicing as doctors.  (It is far too late to train the doctors, nurses and resp-techs we need... so we do what we can.)

Millions of janitors.

Not that many lawyers.  Even fewer bankers.  But some.

COVID-19 is going to punch a big hole in the emergency services community.  Guards are going to have to keep civil order.  Rideshare drivers are going to have to drive ambulances.  Construction workers are going to have to be firefighters.   And that again is if we are lucky.

The mental health crisis, if it were the only crisis we faced, is itself overwhelming.  We have lost a lot of people and we're going to lose more.

This game is going into extra innings.  Don't change that dial, don't give up that seat, and whatever you do, hang on to that popcorn.  Ain't seen nothing yet.

If you think I'm being alarmist, think about what i said last month.  

Now realize that my crystal ball is a second-hand war surplus model with calibration issues.  I've been wrong before, and I hope I'll be wrong again.

I am a creature of civilization.  I will not do well in a post-system world, and I know it.  Too many people have the fantasy of a simpler time, or a Big Igloo, or some other lunatic fringe idea.  The reality is Sally dying because you couldn't get her insulin, or Bobby dying because of an impacted tooth that rotted out, or hanging judges made of the worst gossips in your town dealing out what little justice there is - and you being thankful for it.

If our individual lives are worth defending, and they are, how much more so our body politic, our society, our way of life and our civilization?

Pray make thee ready.