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.