There will be no Post-COVID city

It is 23 June 2025, and at long last, after years of discussions and delays and budget overruns, the largest, most extraordinary COVID-19 Museum in the world is open to the public. Built on top of a small hill, it is visible from many vantage points in the surrounding metropolis that suffered so much during the pandemic. The first two days were reserved for officials and major donors. But this morning, crowds of ticket holders who had waited for months for this moment are arriving at the museum’s gates by any means available. They arrive on foot or by bicycle, on e-scooters and Segways, by Metro or bus, or are dropped off by AVs circling the city center. There are few museum parking spaces, reserved for the handicapped.

The Museum’s mission is to help people remember, understand, and (re-) experience what it was like to be living at the time of a pandemic, and more specifically, the COVID-19 one of 2019–2020, considering that this very likely was the last pandemic to befall humanity for the next century and beyond. There are exhibits from around the world for all age groups and interests. (See the Museum’s catalog for a full listing of the collections.) A special exhibition showcases the top 10 submissions to the 2021 international competition on “Imagining the Post-Pandemic City.” The diversity of conceptions is remarkable, yet all seem to be motivated by the same few underlying assumptions. As a result, all 10 projects are developed around the notion of an impending or eventual flight from the large, dense, crowded metropolis towards smaller settlements in more salutary environments closer to nature.

This first week of the Museum’s opening there is also a daily raffle, and the winners will be invited to a dinner with one of two very special teams: The surviving members of the team that developed the first and most successful COVID-19 vaccine (2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine), or the 2024 team of Nobel laureates, who, using CRISPR and deep learning on a quantum computer, were able to generalize the method used in the production of that vaccine into a procedure for developing successful vaccines for any novel virus.

I wish. But the above flight of fancy may not be total science-fiction. SARS-COVID-2 is a very nasty virus, but it is a member of a known group. In terms of severity the resulting pandemic is surely not the worst humanity has survived, though the disruption it is causing is commensurate with the unprecedented complexity at all scales of today’s global urban system. The damage to local economies and global supply chains is incalculable. And for millions of people, life will never be the same.

Yet even as I write, the great Mediterranean cities of Spain, Italy and Greece are reopening to tourists arriving from currently less impacted countries. There is risk involved in that step deemed necessary to begin reviving moribund economies, but the fact that this is actually taking place right now is very encouraging. Remember that two of these three countries were only recently among the worst hit in the world, and they have now largely recovered. On the medical front, based on new estimates of the prevalence of asymptomatic infections, evidence is emerging that the virus may be up to an order of magnitude less deadly than feared, resulting in mortality rates comparable to those of the seasonal flu. Further: Treatments that actually save lives are beginning to appear. There is a good chance that before the end of this year or a few months beyond, an effective vaccine will be available. And the current level of progress in genomics was unthinkable even a decade ago. This all suggests that at least in OECD countries, COVID-19 qua disease should be less of an issue about a year from now, though its impact on the world economy will be felt for much longer. As for future pandemics, there is hope that lessons learned from the current one will stick long enough to allow for better organized responses. Scientists are already cataloguing the millions of viruses found in wild and domestic animal species, trying to identify the ones most likely to infect humans (The Economist, 2020a). That’s good to know, because Chinese researchers just announced the discovery of another swine flu virus with “pandemic potential” (CNN World 2020).

So the urbanism projects displayed at my COVID-19 Museum must all be wrong. The city as we know it will survive. This opinion may go counter to several educated speculations on the subject found in the media, most of which are extrapolating from current conditions. The key points tend to be (1) the conversion of most office work to remote work from the employees’ homes; (2) the massive substitution of ICT for physical movement, thus enabling (3) the flight from the big city towards small towns and semi-rural settlements (e.g., The Economist, 2020b).

These same arguments were actually made before, in great detail, not on the occasion of a pandemic but relating to the rise of the internet. Graham (2004: 4–5) provides a perceptive overview of the “death of distance” dream going back to the early days of the information age. He gathers and briefly discusses these speculations under seven rubrics: (1) the dissolution of cities; (2) the extensible individual; (3) a much-reduced need for mobility; (4) physical networking will be substituted for by virtual; (5) spatial homogenization; (6) the transmission of place; (7) casting away our material bodies. He also illustrates each of these points with a characteristic quote taken from the work of some respected scholar, dating from the 1960s through to the 1990s. Couclelis (2006) returns to these seven “myths,” expanding each argument to demonstrate its fallacies.

This is not the place to reopen these discussions, but here are some current observations. On the remote work front, there have been recent reports about employees working from home being more creative or productive. However, this is most likely due to the Hawthorne effect, and the improvement should fade away as soon as these workers are no longer in the spotlight. Indeed, major US companies such as IBM, Yahoo, the Bank of America, and many others have tried teleworking in the past but had to call their remote workers back to the office (Spector, 2017).

Regarding the substitution of ICT for physical movement, this is certainly happening during the current, totally unnatural conditions of self-isolation. Yet even our digital-native children and grandchildren cannot live without hugging their friends, and their gregarious behavior in already crowded, barely reopened downtowns is filling older folks with COVID dread. Also recently, rather than keeping people at home, social media radically simplified organizing and coordinating large groups of protesters around the world, resulting in several weeks of very physical street demonstrations.

As for the flight from the dense city, this has been around a very long time, both as fact and as ideal. Avoiding polluted air and disease, the Garden City movement, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, a desire for more land, for safer places to rear children, fear of being the target of nuclear bombs, and the love of open nature, have all been expressions of one-half of the love-hate relationship people have with cities. Cities continued to thrive, regardless.

Finally: The title of this essay, “There will be no post-COVID city” may mean three different things. There will be no city post-COVID because big, dense cities will explode into myriads of small towns and scattered settlements; there will be no generic kind of post-COVID city just as there is no generic kind of city around the world; or, there will be no post-COVID city much different from the pre-COVID city. Allowing for technological, environmental, and socioeconomic trends already underway, and with a nod to the wonderful diversity of cities around the world, I will put my money on the last interpretation. The optimistic one. Yes, cities are in trouble, but this too will pass. Long live the smart, resilient, inventive city! (Batty, 2018).