Questioning pandemic recovery: A regional second city perspective

The Covid-19 pandemic unsettled many assumptions about cities and urban life. Even discounting media fears about urban ‘collapse’, the pandemic and its aftermath have led to real uncertainties about the trajectory of urban development. While the struggles of ‘superstar’ cities in the Global North have attracted significant attention, here we shift focus onto the experiences of regional second cities in an attempt to capture a different perspective. In doing so, we avoid both the sensationalism of ‘doom loop’ projections that herald the end of major cities and the uncritical embrace of new ‘opportunities’ for peripheral cities in the wake of pandemic turmoil. Instead, we offer a more critical view that acknowledges some new possibilities while highlighting both their constrained parameters and the related threat of regional gentrification. As cities around the country begin to recover from the turmoil of pandemic disruption, we accordingly question the applicability and consequences of some of the more prominent recovery strategies beyond the context of major cities and suggest careful consideration of alternative development paths for regional second cities. To illustrate the regional second city experience, we explore recent outcomes in Tacoma, Washington, where the city’s post-pandemic development strategy embraces a reliance on luxury residential growth and associated consumer amenities, defined in relation to the dominant neighbouring city of Seattle. Cautioning over working-class displacement, regional gentrification and other vulnerabilities associated with this version of recovery, we conclude by looking at emerging housing activism in Tacoma for insights into how the present moment might generate new political organising for more equitable urban development.