Major era-defining events have shaped cities for millennia. So what will this one bring? ‘The Post-COVID-19 Urban Futures’ project will hear from contributors about the future for urban development after COVID-19.

Case Study: All cities

There is a generalised idea that once lockdown measures are lifted, everything will “go back to normal.” During the quarantines, we’ve seen change all around us: nature had a very short chance to heal without the influence of humans; communities came together to help each other; international efforts tried to guarantee the safety of the most vulnerable citizens. These events generated a feeling of positivity in many countries where quarantines are being lifted. However, as people started leaving their homes to populate the cities again, they found them very different from what they used to be, as many urban environments have already started to be reshaped to fight and contain the virus.

As life slowly restarts, the idea that everything will go back to how it was seems less and less realistic.

Rather than being changed by the experience of quarantines, it appears that we will be changed by the new world we’ll find outside our homes, as we will be asked to live in cities no longer made to favour socialisation. Even going outside, now that lockdown measures are still in place, means confronting these changes in the urban environment, which can be overwhelming and scary after months of isolation. However, it would have been impossible to expect cities to be left unchanged by such a major paradigm shift of an event.

Like a living organism, cities have grown, expanded and developed according to their historical context. As history unravelled, so they changed, portraying the feelings and ideologies of the time. In the most recent history, we can look back at the two World Wars as prime examples of the relationship between history and urban development, as they affected citizens and intellectuals alike, leading to pivotal changes in all fields, namely urban planning and development.

History and urban planning

After World War I, the modernist movement emerged. The uncontrolled and relentless industrialisation that had taken place before the war had created overcrowded and disorganised cities. In the post-war reality, there was the need to move on from unplanned, irrational cities to rebuild from what was left; modernism pushed forward the idea of the “mechanisation of the city” [i], to bring that order to the urban environment that would allow citizens to identify themselves with their functional cities. The modernist agenda was outlined in the Congrès internationaux d'architecture modern [ii], an organisation started in 1928 with the aim of spreading the ideas of the modern movement. According to the modernist vision, the city would represent the four principal human activities: going around, living, working and recreational time. These main aspects would be spatially separated from each other, to give an appropriate urban representation to each area.

This approach implied the use of new materials, such as steel, glass and reinforced concrete, to allow structures to be functional. The new modernist ideas took the place of the previous neo-classicism style that dominated before the war, which was now deemed inadequate to portray the need of the time to break away from the past and start anew. The concept that “Form follows function” became the motto of the modernist movement, which gave birth to the standardisation of architecture, which has led to the now familiar apartment blocks in most cities’ suburbs. Modernists were strict in their rules: only two units allowed per landing, with a height of three to four stories max, and green spaces built inside the complexes[iii]. The functionalisation of the urban environment was necessary after the war to face the very real problem of rehousing citizens and veterans left homeless. Modernism, by advocating for purified geometry and standardization, perfectly fit with the needs of the time and shaped the appearance of cities after the conflict.

After World War II, the concept of global cities was born. With the end of the war came the realisation that cites are not only places that are most affected by global issues, but, also, stages for political and economic events. Therefore, what happens in the cities has a great repercussion at an international level. This new idea of the global city led to a revolutionised vision of the urban environment, which should now be more inclusive, safe and sustainable. The modernist functional approach suddenly seemed too impersonal and did not manage to truly represent the complicated emotional turmoil of the time, and was therefore abandoned.

Instead, a new approach, known as formalism, was advocated. This new wave was more interested with the decorative qualities of materials and freed architecture from the pragmatic approach that dominated after the first conflict. This meant eliminating the standardised housing solutions found with modernism, and to reduce segregation in cities that were becoming more multicultural due to strong migratory waves from Europe to America. Harmonious urban architecture was the aim of the period and modernism was replaced by the postmodern movement, which strongly criticized the basic ideas of modernism, as they had caused the destruction of urban coherence in favour of function [iv].

For postmodernists, modernist architecture lacked an underlying meaning, essential in the postmodernist vision. The movement looked for a meaning behind architecture, claiming that the humanity of buildings had been lost with the modernist functional approach. With postmodernism, urban planning was rendered urban design; during this time, colourful, eccentric buildings took place of concrete ones, with the aim of reassuring the public instead of disengaging from it. Historical cues were mixed with modernist approaches, in a process known as double coding, first described by Charles Jencks in his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture: the past was not feared, but rather unified with the modern, to give a new look to cities. Architects now felt free to experiment with the Classical style, which they used in the most different ways.

Postmodernism shaped cities until the early 1990s, when the economic crisis caused by the stock market crash of 1987 created the climate of insecurity similar to the one caused by the end of the first Wold War. Modernism, with its simplicity and clear values, once again became the main movement of cities.

What will our cities look like?

Cities have been the centre of the pandemic: the virus has overwhelmed hospitals, emptied public spaces and forced people inside. We have all by now seen pictures of deserted streets all over the world and as the lockdown measures come to an end, there is a real possibility that our cities will never go back to what they used to be. With the end of quarantines and the prospect of a long-lasting crisis, urban planning is changing and architects are already looking for new ideas to allow our cities and the virus to coexist after the lockdown measures are lifted.

At the moment, there is no specific plan for what cities will become; however, what seems sure is that the new cities will have to promote a more local lifestyle and maintain social distancing. Our parks, public transport, communal spaces will have to adjust to prevent infection rates to increase but still allow people to socialise. Plans include micromarkets to supply small areas, which would allow a maximum of six or seven costumers at a time. And maze-like public parks, to permit social distancing in open spaces. Even houses could change after the lockdown, to allow people to go to work and still share their home with their families without the risk of infection. [v]

These innovations in urban design are guided not only by the need to regulate infection rates, but also represent the ideological and philosophical changes of our time, which all seem to gravitate towards a new, more communal civil society, which prioritizes public heath over individual wellbeing. Social cooperation appears to be the only way to allow lockdowns to end while maintaining a reasonable level of personal freedom; this means that, as citizens, we all need to commit to great levels of sacrifice to guarantee the community’s safety.

However, it is undeniable that mutual cooperation is often difficult, or unachievable, in capitalistic societies that revolve around individual self-interest and personal gratification. Political philosophers are now pushing for a new understanding of the concept of state and citizenship, supporting the Hobbesian philosophy of social cooperation, unity and solidarity [vi]. These ideological shifts will surely have a great impact on our cities, which, for the last century, had been designed to prioritise efficiency and productivity over mutual support.

Ultimately, cities cannot be considered outside of their historical context. Urban planning changes depend both on the needs of the citizens and the leading philosophical currents of the time, as well as the emotional requirements of the population. We can learn from the history of urban planning to expect great changes in the near future, as the flaws in public and private spaces have to be addressed and fixed, to make the urban environment safe again. These necessary changes will lead to an urban revolution, equal in scale to the ones that followed the wars and that will reverberate through urban planning for the foreseeable future. Though nothing is completely clear at the moment, transformations will inevitably take place, and we will need to learn to live in a very different environment that what we were used to.

How our relationship with our cities develop once these changes come into place depends on how willing we are to reinvent ourselves within them.  

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Maria Chiara Mantova was born and raised in Naples, Italy. She moved to Manchester in 2016 to study, and is currently a forth year medical student at the University of Manchester.

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[i] https://archiobjects.org/modernism-in-urban-planning-mechanization-or-humanity/

[ii] https://www.citylab.com/design/2020/04/coronavirus-urban-planning-cities-architecture-history/609262/

[iii]https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7c60084k&chunk.id=d0e511&toc.id=&brand=ucpress

[iv] Jane Jacobs, The death and life of Great American Cities.

[v] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/coronavirus-change-cities-infrastructure/

[vi] https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-it-feels-like-we-are-sliding-into-a-period-of-unrest-but-political-philosophy-offers-hope-137006