Abstract
One of the key missions of this journal is to develop a scientific understanding that can be effectively used to enable us to design better cities, however that be defined through equity, efficiency, sustainability, quality of life and a host of other objectives that over the last century have variously been pursued through instruments of physical change. In this sense, science and design are closely intertwined, and although our goal in this field is to unravel many tangled and convoluted ideas, our success has been mixed. Science and design require different perspectives on the world, and although in theory, most believe that good science and good design go hand-in-hand, the differences in viewpoint are significant enough to make the question continually challenging. It is almost a rite of passage to argue that science and design both require intuition and discipline essential to building urban environments that meet the lofty goals of urban planning; but to ensure that this is possible, it remains forever problematic. The past century or more of experience in attempting to build better cities does not bode well for the next century, particularly due to the relative volatility in ideas and values as well as in the focus on physical form that continues to underpin this wider quest.
Into this mix has come the Pandemic. In several previous editorials, I have argued that the form of the future city is only predictable within somewhat narrow physical limits bound by what we regard as incontrovertible assumptions. In short, my thesis has been that for the most part, the future is largely unpredictable and insofar as we have any control over it at all, this is in our hands as it is invented by ourselves: in city planning, this, of course, is largely the design of the physical environment (Batty, 2018, 2020a). Although the dynamics of epidemics and their global equivalent in the form of pandemics are well-known, their emergence and frequency are not. With respect to our own condition, pandemics are probably governed by power laws in that like earthquakes, we never know how severe they will be and when they are coming. As our focus is always on their mitigation, we are continually inventing new strategies to deal with them within a context where our human values are always changing, and this in itself adds to their unpredictability. The last major epidemic of pandemic proportions was a century ago at the end of the First World War and it led to much greater loss of life than the war itself with up to 50 million persons passing away. In those years, there was much greater acceptance that this was nature’s way for there was no science to provide vaccines that might help fight such plagues.
One hundred years later, the current pandemic almost literally ‘came out of left field’, using the analogy with baseball. Since pre-history, there had always been a small cadre of the population, mainly scientists and religious leaders, who speculated on the existence of such infections in human populations, but by and large until such epidemics actually occurred, there was no conscious awareness of their possibility from day to day. In fact prior to the current pandemic, in the last 20 years, there had been scares with respect to emergent viruses such as the SARS in the 2002–2004 outbreak, Ebola, Avian Flu, the 2009 Swine Flu and such like. These viruses were in fact quickly contained perhaps more by luck than judgement although the world was a much less connected place in the first decade of this century than it is now. It has taken 20 years or more for the kind of connectivity that now defines the world to develop and this undoubtedly has been responsible for the current COVID-19 virus moving from an epidemic to a pandemic. It now looks as though the pandemic will be stopped through new vaccines which are about to roll out in many countries. This itself is a triumph of science of that there can be no doubt, but the dark shadow that the virus has cast will be with us for much longer, and it is impossible to predict what impact that might have on the way we think about cities and their design over the next 50 years. It may well be that the technologies we have recently developed for discovering and manufacturing ‘effective’ vaccines (and note that I qualify the term effective for we can only assume at time of writing, 31 December 2020, that they will be so) can be scaled to the point where our capabilities in responding to new viruses mean we will never have to suffer such pandemics again. I doubt this very much for it is in the nature of evolution that such possibilities will always remain, indeed they are the defining feature of life itself. But I am getting beyond the argument that this editorial intends to present and that is about the way we might develop city science and design in the light of what we are learning from the current pandemic.
Before I do so, let me sketch three sets of factors about the nature of the pandemic itself. Firstly, when it began, it was quickly recognised as a disease which spread from individual to individual through respiratory means. There has never been any doubt that if you are in close contact with someone who has the disease, and you are in contact for long enough, the probability of contracting the disease simply by breathing in the air around the infected person will be very high. We do not really know how long you have to be in contact but we think that if you are more than 2 m from someone, then this distance is a minimum for the probability of transmission to be relatively lower. This led many years ago to the social distancing rule of 2 m (Batty, 2020b). I am not sure if we know much more than this with respect to the parameters associated with contact for it is extremely difficult to get this kind of data through natural or controlled experiments. With respect to how much of the virus and how long it remains alive on surfaces, there is a sense in which contracting the disease by touching such a surface appears less likely than was assumed at the start of the pandemic. Experiments in closed spaces seem to suggest that the virus disperses quite quickly and thus letting air circulate as freely as possible is a wise strategy for minimising contact with it.
Secondly, when it comes to those who are most likely to be infected and those who are most likely to require intensive care, then we know that one or more other illnesses appear to increase the chance of mortality while age and, to an extent, ethnicity appear to be significant factors. To an extent, ethnicity is related to other life style factors and opportunities and this is where the picture becomes socially and geographically rather messy. Now that the vaccine is about to be rolled out, then the interaction between the probability of contracting the disease in some place may well depend on the administration of the vaccine to groups of the population in the same place, and the relative impact this might have on local infection rates. As far as I am aware, we do not have much data from other epidemics about the interaction between such public health measures and the way these impact on the overall rates of infection. In short, we know very little apart from common-sense, about the way such vaccination programs might be rolled out and their impact on groups of people who do not receive the vaccine.
Thirdly, the impact on the economy and society more generally has been profound. A large number of people working from home using internet technologies, closure of all but essential retail, educational and medical facilities, the movement from public transport to individual personalised mobility such as biking and walking with the consequent near bankruptcy of public transport everywhere, restrictions on the mixing of households, all in the quest to socially distance ourselves from each other – these have had a profound effect already on the state of the economy with the worst depression in Britain for 300 years since the Great Frost of 1709 (Hambling, 2020). What beckons beyond this when the pandemic ends or at least becomes manageable is an unknown country. In assessing the impact on how we engage with cities in terms of movement during the pandemic, these patterns have been catalogued quite thoroughly with big changes in mobility and location as reflected in Google’s Mobility Reports (Google, 2020), in Think-Tanks like the Centre for Cities (CC, 2020), and many other agencies.
This simple three-fold caricature of the pandemic into the effects of transmission on individuals, impacts on different population groups and impacts on the economy all have important repercussions on how cities evolve and function, and of course, on the quality of life that they are able to engender. In fact, from our own perspective which relates to the significance of anything that happens at a location including interactions and related links between locations, then virtually everything that we publish in this journal is affected by the pandemic. At first sight, when the pandemic broke, most of the focus was on epidemiological issues although there were groups such as the Royal Society’s Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic (RAMP, 2020) which cast their net a little wider. In fact as the pandemic unfolded, more and more features of it have been related to one another, our three-fold caricature acting as a sort of skeletal framework which has been filled in and fleshed out. In terms of this journal, the focus on diffusion and spread of the pandemic at mega-city and regional if not national levels has led to a small but distinct set of research currently under review and about to appear in print. Unlike the medical and scientific literature, the speed of publication in our own field is much slower where the focus on rapid publication is much less immediate although things are beginning to speed up. Only one paper has been published (in online first) since the first papers on the pandemic were submitted some 6 months ago (see Mu et al., 2020) but we can expect more. The focus of these reflects our concern in this journal for accessibility, physical distancing, morphology and the spatial dynamics of interaction and diffusion, and it will take a couple of years more to actually assess how the broad body of work in our own field has been influenced by the rise of the pandemic.
In a field like our own where much of the science and its application in terms of design and policy is about the longer term, the focus on short-term events – over days and weeks rather than years and decades – is a perspective that has only emerged in the last decade or so, since the age of the smart city began. Most of the papers in this journal have dealt with models and analyses of cities at a cross-section in time or over years and decades which is assumed to be the long term. The way we tend to look at cities too is at more aggregate scales than the individual, in terms of aggregates of population and other activities and this too only has meaning only over longer periods of time. Thus the emphasis on changes in individuals in cities is a much more recent thing in terms of this particular science. It coincides of course with the scaling down of computers to the point where individual data can be streamed from mobile and fixed devices about objects and individuals as well as the increase in the size of computers to enable us to build models of how individuals (or agents) relate to one another. Much of the focus on understanding the pandemic is thus on the fine scale and until data can be aggregated into the sort of patterns that more aggregate analysis of cities presupposes, we will not see the results of many projects dealing with COVID-19 in cities in this journal.
At present, most research is focused on taking fine scale mobility data and measuring how movement patterns have changed. Aggregate patterns of how income and other economic activities have changed spatially are being researched at a coarser spatial scale within cities and regions but much of this analysis is limited by data. In fact, many of the data sets required to explore how aggregate patterns change over short time intervals such as weeks and months are still rather incomplete, although such data are getting more detailed and more widely available. The pandemic and the way it is impacting our own research thus reflects the tension over dealing with fine scale events that need aggregation for their understanding but over short time intervals, this posing something of a paradox in terms of conventional urban analysis. In summary, the pandemic has laid bare once again the problem of thinking about cities as fine scale events and individual decision-making behaviour and the need to aggregate to extract meaningful patterns that can be used to explain such behaviour in the large.
Thus, we not only need to employ our models to explain individual behaviours at the fine spatial scale over very short time periods but to aggregate up to the larger scales and time periods to produce consistent understanding over this spectrum. Thus scale is intimately intertwined with our understanding of the pandemic. So far in the practical management of the disease and its mitigation, the spatial dimension has been handled rather crudely. Most of the analysis has been at the individual scale, and its aggregation to larger areas although becoming ever more significant in explaining the disease, has led to rather blunt instruments of control of social distancing and household mixing. This is as much because we do not have good theory for dealing with events such as these. Only in hindsight when the pandemic is over and we have the luxury of looking back, will we be able to develop a wider, more satisfying explanation of the way in which individual transmission, local mixing of population, movement across wide areas and the way the social and monetary economy is reflected in the way individuals react to measures of control. Once the pandemic ends, research spun off from our conventional longer standing concerns will have both enriched our approaches but exposed deep inconsistencies in our work. Hopefully, this will result in new ways of seeing how the myriad of interactions in social and city systems work themselves out and can be used to handle future pandemics, indeed future crises of any kind which display the same concern for individual and aggregate behaviours.
I cannot sketch the broad outlines of how this city science might proceed because it is not well defined. This is too wide a canvas to paint here but we do have various tools and methods at our disposal that give us some sense of how existing cities are organised in terms of their form and function and the processes that enable cities to evolve to different states. Yet the link to the design of future cities has always been tentative. This is something that this journal aims for – to publish research that shows us ways in which we can design future cities, invent them if you like, to meet certain widely agreed objectives. We can examine the pandemic and probably agree that future cities should be more resilient than our contemporary ones with respect to dramatic changes in the way we need to interact with one another. If we need to live with some measure of social distancing in both the near and longer term future, this will change the shape of cities, probably quite radically in terms of the way we arrange our activities. The focus on high density hubs might be quite different from the present polarised polycentric forms that dominate most cities world-wide where the biggest hubs represent the highest densities of work and living, serviced by highly congested transport systems that aim at delivering as many people as possible to work at such concentrated poles. We do have various models which we could optimise to explore such possibilities, models where distance between individuals, objects and their aggregates are central to the outcomes produced.
In the past, the rational process of building a model of how a city worked and the forms consistent with such functioning involved first developing an understanding of how activities interact followed by the introduction of control mechanisms which would improve those interactions to meet certain goals. Usually in such city models, activities were optimised in such a way that distances were minimised, activities packed together to achieve economies of scale while at the same time enabling efficient and cost-effective movement. In terms of COVID-19 or any similar virus, the question might be posed the other way around: how will cities look if they are designed around social distancing? All we can do is speculate because although such models do exist – in fact there are a whole class of location-allocation models emanating from operations research that might be the basis of such exploration but we have not exploited them widely enough. They have not become standard, largely because over the last 30 years the field has lost interest in thinking about future cities. Urban analytics based on fine scale data and short time horizons have sapped some of the energies from such longer term thinking.
As part of our wider agenda not only in terms of understanding the pandemic but also in terms of where we might head with respect to thinking about future cities and their design, there is now an enormous challenge in thinking about the city of the future. Mix in ideas about social distancing, notions about density but more speculative concepts involving automated means of mobility such as autonomous vehicles, our future urban forms might at first sight appear to be very different from our existing cities. Ideas about the central city, sprawling suburbs and polycentric forms are likely to play out rather differently in such futures. This agenda – or rather at this point merely a trend worth reinforcing – is a basis for initiating new ways of thinking about urban futures which build on the fact that we now have the technologies to explore such futures many-fold, multiple times, rapidly evolving forms that spur on our intuition in thinking about better designs. Fitting all this into the wider context of urban analysis and planning continues as one of the major challenges in the design of future cities. This has been the mission of this journal since its inception and although readers might find it hard to reconcile this with some of the more esoteric methods that we cover, much of what we publish can be related through the notion of design as rational problem-solving based on the best science we have in terms of our understanding of the contemporary city.