Abstract
In the study of infectious diseases, social distancing is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2020) as a set of “methods for reducing frequency and closeness of contact between people in order to decrease the risk of transmission of disease”. It is the dominant way in which we use our intuition to reduce the risk of contact by keeping ourselves apart from one another, and it is most important in situations where most of those around us are not particularly familiar with one another and where the infection in those populations is largely unknown. Wherever there is danger of infectious disease, this is the usual strategy adopted, and in the modern era, since the late 19th century if not before, this has been the preferred mode of behaviour until a vaccine or related preventive drug treatments are discovered. Most of these strategies however are targeted at the very small scale, keeping people apart from one another at short distances, usually more than 1 to 2 metres. In situations where we have little knowledge about how a virus might spread, most of the instruments we use to control infection operate at this finest scale. When it comes to scaling these ideas up, to deal with clusters of buildings, neighbourhoods, districts, entire towns and so on, our ideas are much more flimsy and we have very few tried and trusted strategies for suppressing the virus and reducing infections at these higher levels. By and large, what we know about behaviour patterns at these larger scales and what the best kinds of behaviour might be to avoid the diseases, is largely an open book with advice about distancing and travelling largely based on our intuition and what we observe, but often superficially and only at the smaller of scales.
At the time of writing (October 2020), it looks as though Britain is beginning a second wave of infection associated with the Coronavirus and implementing social distancing at scale is now being fashioned around complete lockdowns which restrict social contacts to households and rigorously regiment spacing in shops, schools, entertainment hubs, workplaces and so on where larger groups congregate. The question is thus ‘what do we know about social distancing at scale and how are the multitude of movements that we engage in as part of city life being affected at these many different scales?’ Even though we may well revert to traditional patterns of movement when the pandemic is eventually suppressed, as it will surely be once we learn enough about the physiological nature of the disease, the social distanced city may last for a while yet. Because the public health crisis posed by the disease is so key to the economy, it is important to think about policies that might enable a much more effective use of our existing technologies for mobility and the location of spatial activities which might mitigate the impact of the disease.
There still exist major problems in figuring out transmission of the disease at the most local levels. The virus can be transmitted in several ways but we do not have any clear idea of their relative importance, intensity or longevity. Contacts from droplets through coughing or sneezing, close physical contact through touching, coming into physical contact with contaminated objects and surfaces, and aerosol transmission which depends on how long the virus remains suspended in the air, all of these are significant methods of diffusion. Moreover, we do not know whether different people have differing degrees of susceptibility, or rather, although we assume there are variations, we do not have much idea of what these are. Many of these factors might actually be linked to non-physical attributes such as deprivation, income, education and so on – cultural and social factors that is.
To an extent then, there are few guidelines to scaling up social distancing to large areas from the ‘very’ local but it is clear that although social distancing is key to the ‘very local’, the ‘very local’ itself changes when we consider different types of mobility. For example, transmission of the virus on modes of transport other than simply walking or biking also has a social distancing effect – on trains and buses for example – where to exercise the 2 metre rule, requires new layouts for seating and standing. The fact that such modes are normally packed with travellers who necessarily infringe the 2 metre rule means that the demand for using such modes of travel has collapsed. A large proportion of the population now wish to avoid such mass transit where crowding is normal and where the probability of contracting the disease is now very much greater than avoiding such modes altogether either travelling by car or walking and biking. The impact of this social distancing on mobility in large cities has been dramatic. Early in 2020 when the first lockdowns were implemented in many countries around the world, the biggest cities saw a dramatic decline in movement using mass (public) transport. In the UK, up to 80% of workers were either furloughed and did not work or worked from home and combined with reluctance to use mass transit, of those essential workers who remained at work, a large proportion of them avoided mass transit altogether. Volumes dropped dramatically and only when the lockdown began to ease did the number of workers using transit begin to slowly increase. In bigger cities, this recovery has been much more muted. It is easy to see these impacts in the fall in number of people working or visiting the largest cities where the numbers populating their centres are now a tiny fraction of their former levels.
Therefore the immediate consequence of social distancing is the development of ‘working from home’. The possible collapse of the office market in the biggest cities and of course retailing all stem from our reluctance to travel using traditional modes of transport and our strong caution in putting ourselves in situations where crowding, no matter how regimented and controlled, would appear to increase the probabilities of infection. In short, the pandemic has destroyed the standard model around which cities have been organised for millennia. This model is based on the notion that most cities evolved from some central point usually based on the place where people exchange their goods or exercise their power. The centre thus dominates the city. Its radial routes that people take to travel to the centre and the concentric rings of like urban activities or land uses that characterise the rents and densities that best fit the way the land market works, determine the skeletal structure around which the city’s various functions take place. For the last 100 years, this model has led to increased movement to and from the centre and an explosion of growth in the suburbs. There have been small reversals of these trends in the last 20 years with people wanting to live and work in the core of the largest cities and there have been new hubs or edge cities established which draw some of the functions away from the centre to the rest of the urban area (Batty, 2018). But in general, the standard model is still the dominant focus of the contemporary city and it is this structure that has been somewhat turned on its head by the pandemic. People have fled to the suburbs where working from home is dominant, city centres have been emptied of workers and shoppers, while mass transit has collapsed and car usage has dramatically increased.
To gauge the impact of this social distancing at scale, there are key indicators pertaining to how mobility has changed over the course of the pandemic. Axhausen (2020) is developing an ongoing study of mobility across all of Switzerland and he reveals that the classic pattern of a dramatic fall in transit usage in the order of 30% at the start of the pandemic has now risen almost back to pre-pandemic levels across different cities. Haldane (2020) presents similar results from Google Mobility for the UK which indicates that in places such as central London, use of transit dropped by almost 90% at the start of the pandemic but had only improved to some 40% by the end of September 2020. Disaggregating these trip volumes by types of activity shows that there is little difference between these types. It would appear that the effects of social distancing on public transport have suppressed every level to less than 50% of their pre-pandemic volumes across most types of activity – work, retail, grocery shopping and so on.
We are in a vacuum when it comes to theory with respect to how to interpret the impact of the pandemic on the form and function of cities. Even our standard model is but a sketch of how the impact of changes in mobility on the relationship between core and periphery might change. In fact as we have argued several times before in these editorials, cities are getting more complex as they evolve. The pandemic, if treated as an historical one-off event, is likely to condition the future in a way that may never be completely clear. In terms of mobility, some of the changes with respect to working from home, the demise of mass transit, the switch to alternative modes and the increasingly rapid shift to online market places are likely to stick after the pandemic ends. You can even begin to see changes to the physical fabric of the way we move around the city as local municipalities begin to clawback road space for alternative modes of transport. This is most clearly seen in the UK in the City of London where pavements (sidewalks) are being widened, bike lanes and bus lanes continue to be established, with the car relegated to quite circuitous routes for navigating into and across the City. Given that there is a congestion and a low emissions charge adding to some £30 a day to drive within the City – ‘the square mile’, then it is not surprising that the car has been almost squeezed out of the centre as Figure 1 shows.
Social distancing in the City of London at the most local level on the street but note the absence of cars (and people).
Yet the impact on surrounding areas has been severe for there is now almost complete gridlock in the inner area as the car is still the preferred mode of individual transport for avoiding the pandemic. It is very difficult to predict what will happen when the pandemic ends for even its ending is unpredictable. Will it peter out with a whimper or will there be a grand vaccination program which will restore everyone to health over a fairly short period of time such as by the end of 2021? What sort of social distancing will stick and what is the future of the car and mass transit? Mass transit has been in deep financial trouble for over 70 years and if we rapidly move to automated vehicles, then the consequences on the density, shape and extent of cities could be dramatic. Just as the pandemic has demonstrated how unpredictable is the recent past, because cities have been turned on their heads by this succession of events, we have little idea what the future might bring. But we still need better theory to enable us to handle this future, to grapple with unpredictability and to explore not only what might happen to the future of cities but what sorts of cities we wish for. In this sense, the socially distanced city is one of many options that we need to take seriously.