Is Coronavirus the End of Cities?

the people who left come back? How will we figure out what it means to live in a denser or less denser environment in an age of pandemic. Here to talk with me about the pandemic, about cities, and about protests is Jennifer Bradley. She is the founding director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute. She has spent her entire career thinking about cities, how they function, and how we can make them better. Recently, she's been

thinking a lot about the impact of Corona on city life. Jennifer, thank you so much for being here. You spent your entire career thinking about and analyzing and making recommendations for how cities should operate and operate better. And now we're facing what feels to me like the biggest crisis for cities in our lifetimes. What has been your experience over the last few mad months in thinking through and rethinking

the issues you've been working on your whole career. I think that the thing that strikes me over both the arc of my career and then particularly within the last three months, is that cities are resilient. You remember it in the early days of the pandemic, there were these kind of prefervid, hysterical articles. Our cities over density seems to be the key to the spread. So will we ever go back to cities? Will we ever go back

on the subway? And what you realize now when restrictions are starting to lift is it's very hard, it's almost impossible to keep people apart from each other. So there is this there is something in us as social creatures and social animals that brings us towards the congregation, the connection, and particularly now the novelty and variety of cities since

we've been stuck in our houses for so long. So I think that resiliency is going to be what will help cities move into whatever it is we're going to encounter next. I think you're also seeing an understanding that the city is many things. The city is both a government, but it's also these formal and informal networks of support,

protection and organization and practices. And I think the fact that cities are networked and distributed will help them moving forward, because what they have to deal with moving forward is radical shifts and declines in their budgets. Right when tax

revenues go down, city budgets are decimated. So I think what we're going to see is our understanding of what is a city evolved from something that's more top down in government centric to something that's more distributed, flexible, a kind of diy urbanism, and that will be bumpy and unpredictable, but also truer to the spirit of cities, I think, and so that gives me some hope for the future. There are so many rich things in what you just said, and I'm going to try to tease out a few

of them from you. Let me start with where you began about the city as a place of connections. One of the amazing things about cities is that, of course people have all kinds of connections in small towns and in suburbs, but they're a little more predictable. That is to say, we know a large percentage of the people in the place where we are, or we know how to think about those people. But in a city, we

have all these surprising juxtapositions. And that's one of the things that we love about cities, and that makes city life distinctive and unique. How does that change when it's precisely the idea of the random juxtaposition that is frightening us by making us wonder if it's going to lead to our being infected. I mean, is there some danger that the most distinctive thing about city life, or one of the most distinctive things about city life, becomes a

source of fear rather than a source of joy. I don't think so. I think if you look at the way that the pandemic trends have unfolded or played out in the last couple of weeks, you see that there are super spread or events within intimate families, within funeral within birthday parties. So we are not necessarily safer with the people we know than with people that we don't know, and cities have always been about how to behave in

public and how to behave civilly with strangers. And I think in some ways it might actually be easier to behave civilly with strangers to understand. I hope we get to the point where we understand that going outside during this period without a mask should be as unthinkable as going outside without pants. We begin to understand that we need to wash our hands. It can be easier to do that in the kind of semi anonymous public spaces than it can be with those who are close to us.

Right when we wouldn't necessarily want to say, oh, Dad, you know I can't hug you. You really do need to wear a mask to keep you safe, to keep me safe. So I think that being in public with strangers is actually going to feel kind of invigorating, and we will find new ways and protocols, right the nod over the mask rather than the full smile, different ways of greeting people, and this feeling that we're all going

through something on our streets together. I think we will want more public having been so radically private and privatized in all of our dealings. That's actually very inspiring, and I love what you said. Another word you used was resilience, that cities are places of resilience. What if people start leaving.

My parents live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which I like to refer to as the city that frequently sleeps, and the New York Times reported using cell phone data that something like two thirds of the census tract in which they live left the city. Now, that's an extreme neighborhood. Obviously in many way as a high percentage of that people they are can afford to go somewhere else. But one wonders if that is the harbinger

of something to come. Do you have the sense that there will be a decline in the population of major cities over time? You rescue that question with the caveat of adding the word major cities. Cities are not all one thing. I think there may be less attraction in the near term for incredibly high cost, incredibly dense cities like certain parts of New York. People are talking about

San Francisco. Whether engineers want to pay the extraordinarily high housing costs when if they're working from home, they might just as well live happily in Denver or Portland or Austin. Or Boise. I don't think though, that this spells a kind of end of cities or even end of big cities, for several reasons. One, cities are incredibly hard to kill. You look at a city like Detroit. Detroit's lost more than a million people, but it's still actually a viable city.

It is still actually one of the larger cities in the United States. And what people are forgetting right now when people are able to work from homework from anywhere, is that that's essentially the interest off of the accumulated social capital that was built up through face to face interactions, through the random meetings, through running into a colleague in the hall. That's not going to be sustainable over the

course of decades. Also, cities are important labor markets, and you'll need a wide number of opportunities for people who are in two career households. So it's fine if one person in the family is a Facebook engineer and can work from anywhere, but her partner may not have the same privilege and may need to be back in that dense labor market of a San Francisco or a Los

Angeles or even a Denver or an Austin. So I just don't see this trend reversing and turning on its head and again, because there are other aspects of cities too. They're not just places to work, they're places for discovery, delight, for culture. I'm stunned. You can't keep people out of restaurants. I'm blown away by this. Right, people are risking their

health for brunch. So that says to me that there is something about cities urbanity, And I don't make a strong distinction between city and suburb when I say this. I just think it's meets so deep a need in the human spirit that we will keep finding ways to gather like this. I completely share your instinct that it's kind of an inspiring fact about the human need for social contact that people, as you put it, are risking

their lives for brunch, which is a great phase. But to say that is also to realize that all of my public health professional friends, you know, many of whom have been on the show, their responses, it's crazy to risk your life for brunch. It's a mistake. What we need our firmer regulations and maybe firmer social norms that

make it clear that we shouldn't be doing this. They do not think, for the most part that restaurants should be open for brunch if people will risk their lives to go there, and I add it oar, but we will not be in pandemic forever. I recognize that that's part of the question, and maybe I should cash out that question. It's of course possible that this winter will know that there is a vaccine that will work, and that's the wonderful best case scenario, you know, Dao SX Machina,

and we all get back to life. And in that scenario,

I couldn't agree with you more. But there's also a possibility, and a lot of the experts seem to think it's a probability that what we'll find then is actually that we can't do that, that none of the vaccines really works, or that they work somewhat, or that they work for younger and healthier people, and that in that scenario, we're going to have to start accepting the long term presence of pandemic, not of the that kills everybody all the time,

but that kills some of the people some of the time. And under those circumstances, you can already feel any here. The public health professionals saying we're gonna have to maintain social distancing for the foreseeable future. What about in that situation, I mean, doesn't that pose more fundamental threats to the aspiration to social life that we associate with cities. Yes, and there are very dense cities that seem to be managing and figuring this out. I think we will change cities,

but plagues haven't killed cities. The times that we have dramatically reduced our density and shifted our gradient has been because of enormous public campaigns and massive amounts of subsidies. That's when we change the American landscape in the middle of the century through the nineties. Absent that combination of both significant campaign and massive subsidies, I don't see how

it will work and where it will come from. And this just tells you basically that I'm an urbanist and I'm committed to cities, and I will endeavor to keep them strong and safe. But I don't know that my life would be necessarily better in a more suburban environment than it is living in an apartment building in Washington, d C. I very much wish I had in unit washer dryer, But other than that, I don't see how

it's better if I'm out in only Maryland. It's a hugely important insight that you've written about that the movement to the suburbs that we associate with the post World War two period wasn't just some accident, and wasn't just the result of market forces, but was also the result

of government policies and subsidies. What I'm wondering is if we might not see over the next three to five years a kind of less explicit, but nevertheless present reorientation of how government officials think about cities, because I think a lot of the urbanist picture that you've been describing has been embraced by lots and lots of public officials in the last decade or two. But that seems to

me shapeable and malleable. And if you're a government official and you're going to be elected or voted out of office based on your COVID numbers, and if you're consistently seeing which I'm not saying will be, but imagine consistently seeing that it's in your urban areas that you have the largest amount of COVID cases, it is possible to imagine government officials, I think, saying you know what, let's de emphasize density. Let's not invest in the infrastructure that

makes density work. Let's not invest more in our public transit systems, let's not invest more in bike lanes. I'm not saying this will happen, but it does seem like there could be that kind of a reorientation of a historical type if we get this perception that cities are where the virus is fair. That said, if you look at the data from the most recent case surges, you're not seeing a tight correlation with density. So you're seeing Arizona, Florida,

my home state of Texas. These are not exceptionally dense places as the American landscape goes. But aren't we seeing in those places that the spikes when you break it down within those states, are happening in relatively denser parts of those states as opposed to the more rural areas. Yeah, exactly, or ex urban areas. Yes and no, right, I mean there can be You know, you also look at the meatpacking plants, which are dense within the walls but played

out in a less dense, larger landscape. So the density I think that we have to be most worried about is essentially household and workplace density as opposed to neighborhood or city level density. What I would love to see is policy focusing on housing and overcrowding so that people were not living in dangerous individual unit conditions, that people

who need housing can get housing. Where I would like all of this energy to go is in figuring out from an epidemiological point of view, from a social point of view, from an economic point of view, what do we need to do to make density safe. We'll be back in a moment, Jennifer. One of the things that you spoke about was how cities are networks of support, networks of connection, and that in some way they're in that sense decentralized. That's a fascinating idea and it's counterintuitive

to me. So would you say more about that. When I think of the city, I think of concentration rather than of diffusing of authority or responsibility. So please explain. You see this anecdotally in stories about people caring for their neighbors, right, looking out for somebody down the street who may be immunocompromised or who may be elderly, and bringing them groceries. Right. Those are informal, mutual networks of support.

You see it in the way that different neighborhoods have responded to well intentioned but poorly thought out policy initiatives during this time. So, for example, Oakland decided to pedestrianize a large amount of streets without thinking about who might need those streets for car parking and commuting. So that was frontline workers in neighborhoods that were predominantly populated by people of color, and this notion of safe streets kind

of imposed was not an appropriate policy response. So neighborhoods are organizing to get the kinds of things that they need during the pandemic and show that they are differentiated in a kind of self determining way. And we all know that power across the city and power across neighborhoods is not necessarily evenly distributed, and organizational capacity and interest is not necessarily evenly distributed. And I think we're seeing those differences in capacity play out and places that have

not previously been organized organizing more forcefully. Right because your home, you're nearer your neighbors, you can kind of engage with them. You are now better able to organize and identify yourself and to speak up for yourself. Then I think this will come up more and more as cities have to make difficult choices about the distribution of resources during the

next phase, once there is more economic activity. You use the phrase DIY urbanism, which is also really fascinating, and I want to hear more about that, because it seems to me that a lot of what we've seen during this Corona period is municipal governments how us what to do. Where I live Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is a weird city, but it is my city, is the one I grew

up in and I love it. You know, long before the state had a mass coordinance, the city had a mass coordinance that it was enforcing I think practically not at all. But Cambridge being Cambridge, there was lots of moral enforcement from people on the streets. But that was the opposite of do it yourself. It was the government does it. When I hear DIY, I imagine sort of spontaneously organizing individuals rather than the institutions of the city.

But maybe that's not what you meant by do it yourself. I think you can look at right, so you could say that Cambridge decided on its own that it was not going to wait for the lead of the state of Massachusetts that it had a better understanding of what residents needed. The other DIY urbanism I'm seeing is people reclaiming the streets in particular ways, shifting more street space to pedestrians as opposed to cars without waiting for an

official city designation, spontaneous but socially stons gatherings. One could argue that these protests that have been rolling through the month of June and continuing in some cities are also a kind of reclaiming of public space in a powerful way that bespeaks a desire to use and shape space, even in a pandemic, in a way that responds to particular needs. So I think people will continue to use

the city space to get what they want. People make the city as they live in it, I guess is the point that I'm trying to get at, and I call that DIY urbanism for short. But that's what makes cities so fascinating is they're not top down enterprises. So, yes, you have the government setting basic rules, you need to wear a mask, these businesses will and will not open.

This is how commerce is being dictated, and then it's how people use in shape and play with and interrogate and even subvert those rules that I find interesting and

compelling and profoundly urban. The Black Lives Matter protests, spurred most recently by the killing of George Floyd, are themselves, as you were saying, a phenomenon with great implication for urbanism, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, both about the spontaneous, self organizing, kind of inspiring aspects of the protests, and also about at the periphery of the protests the occasional looting and violence, which has also been a recurrent feature of urban life in the United States,

not just since nineteen sixty eight, but going back even before them. I look at the Black Lives Matter protests as a commentarian, even an indictment about how racialized space is in cities. All spaces Cambridge versus Somerville, DC versus Prince George's County have been designated and racialized. And one of the things of the interesting to me about the Black Lives Matter protest is they seem to be places

of emerging integration in cities. That's interesting to me. What will as we play out the Black Lives Matter social and political changes what will that mean for city space integration, Who is welcome on what kinds of streets? Who we think of as our neighbors. To me, cities are like, it's two thousand years of political philosophy in your zoning code,

right Like. The cities are where we play out our public and private philosophies, including a systemic racism which has been an important part of America's political philosophy, which is literally encoded in city streets and who gets to use them and who feels safe where? So, how is that going to change as far as looting and protests goes? When you say that, all I can think of is

the nineteen twenty one Tulsa race massacre. That was looting, right, That was looting, and that was violence, and it was state sanctioned violence against a rising middle class black population. And I think that the disruptions that we're seeing now are a inexcusable and be nothing as compared to the kinds of state sanctioned violence, looting, economic disruption, property disruption that white people have perpetuated in neighborhoods of color for decades.

And one of the things that heartened me is that many DC white shopkeepers you know whose businesses were vandalized, said, it's property, and I can replace property. And I think there is a appropriate understanding that the violence of some people who are using the protests as an opportunity doesn't invalid the larger undertaking. One last question. Your approach is I think measured, thoughtful, and on the whole optimistic. Do

you have any dark thoughts? I mean, I think the structure of our conversation has been my asking dark questions. And you're telling me, you know, don't overstate at Feldman. You know you're taking it too far, and in fact that all these good things and they're coming back. And I think that's a good and a heartening set of responses. But do you have any worries? Maybe different ones than I've thought about. I do worry about public transit. New

York does not work without public transit. There's no way that people are going to be able to move about in private vehicles at a volume that a place like New York once. And I do worry a little bit about temporarily defunding public transit. That I was worried about that before. I've been worried about that since people started making this argument with autonomous vehicles. I think public transit

is hugely important. My hope is that there is a lip and that people say no. Public transit is actually a public good and it's what frontline workers are using, and we need to figure out again how to take what we have and make it safe. So that's that's one fear. I fear younger people remembering this and having a fear associated with being outside. I worry during this period about loneliness. I have a lot of love in my life, but I am going out of my mind.

I'm desperate to see people, and I worry about As I said at the beginning, I do worry about the loss of social capital. We're living off the interest of all the relationships that we built up face to face. How long before we start diving into the principle and eroding important nonfamilial relationships because we haven't been able to tend them face to face. There are just their cues that we miss. I worry that this might go on long enough that will forget a little bit. Mostly I

worry about public transportation. Public transporation out of loneliness. Both are existential, though inside the different ways. Yeah, But despair and optimism and they're so closely braided. Right. So I live on the edge of Rock Creek Park and there's a little like Parker exercise zone just underneath my apartment, and people are just Wow, they're using it. You can't keep them away from it. It's just body after body after body on those things. And I'm like, guys, that's

really a bad idea. But the upside is, Wow, people have come to depend on public space and public trails and nature and cities more than ever, and much better to work out outdoors than to work out in an indoor gym. So is this an opportunity for people to say, Wow, we didn't know how much we needed the public realm until the private realm shrunk and all these third spaces, these spaces that are neither home norfully public, shutdown. So wow,

let's invest in them. Can we make that connection? Can we say we loved these things and we needed them, so we want to protect them and continue to love them when Washington Sports Club or whatever is open again. Jennifer, thank you so much for your thoughtful analysis and for your time, and for the amazing work that you've always been doing that you're continuing to do. It's more important

than ever now. Thank you, Thank you. Listening to Jennifer's analysis actually made me feel a little bit better about the future of urban life in the United States that I was feeling going into the conversation. Sure, there will be aspects of cities that will change, but as Jennifer points out, the human need to connect socially, which cities serve, continues even in a pandemic and can evolve and change.

Humans are resilient. Cities are resilient, They're hard to kill, their spaces of creativity, and they give opportunities for us to come back. What's more, Jennifer points us to what she calls a diy urbanism, where cities are taking the lead and trying to construct space and experience in ways

that will facilitate making us safer and better off. There's no question that they're going to be challenges to cities in the years ahead, but as Jennifer points out, there have been challenges to cities almost since there have been cities at all. Every so often, I let the dark side of my fears begin to affect the questions that

I ask on this show. And that's why it's so good to have a guest like Jennifer who turns me right around and points to the optimism that we ought to have when we think about the capacity of the human spirit and a human social interaction to overcome even the challenges that we're facing. Right now. We'll be back in a moment and now for our segment that we call play back, where I choose a recent moment from the news, play it back to you and analyze it.

So here we are. The Supreme Court, including the President's appointees, have declared that he is not above the law. That was the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaking last Thursday about the Supreme Court's ruling that the New York District Attorney may have access to the president's financial records as part

of a grand jury investigation. At the same time, the Supreme Court also held that Congress could not necessarily have access to the president's tax returns, but potentially would be able to get it if it satisfied a new legal standard, a test that the Supreme Court laid out. The central message of these cases is one the Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinions in both cases, quoted from the most influential Chief Justice in the history of the United

States until him, that is John Marshall. The president is not a king, and therefore the president is not above the law. In practical terms, we probably aren't going to see Donald Trump's tax returns any time soon, but the Supreme Court, per Chief Justice Roberts, vindicated the principle that no person, including the president, is above the law and open the door for lots of different kinds of investigations of a sitting president, including even criminal investigations at the

state level. This result is gratifying, but it's important to understand that it reflects a process whereby Chief Justice John Roberts has truly been transformed. The transformation isn't in Roberts's political ideology. Rather, it has to do with the way his respect for judicial precedent is interacting with his very very strong sense that he must vindicate the rule of law in his job of Chief Justice of the United States. Roberts started his time as Chief Justice being prepared to

defer to Donald Trump, including in the Trump vy. Hawaii case. Since then, little by little, it has increasingly taken on

the role of holding Trump to account. Robert said he was deeply influenced by the President of Chief Justice John Marshall, a precedent laid down in a case involving, believe it or not, the treason trial of Aaron Burr, the same man who shot and killed Alexander Hamilton and subsequently led a conspiracy to try to start a new country carved out of part of the western part of the United States. Thomas Jefferson was the president, and he wanted to prosecute Burr. Marshall,

who didn't like Jefferson, stood up to Jefferson. He demanded that Jefferson satisfy the terms of a subpoena that Burr sought in his own defense, namely that the President of the United States provide documents to the court that Jefferson had quoted in his message to Congress condemning Burr. The takeaway of this precedent for Roberts was that the courts must be able to stand up to the president. Without that, the president would not be subject to the rule of law.

That same principle of standing up for the rule of law and the power of the courts was also present in Roberts's decision earlier this term to preserve Dhaka and not to allow Donald Trump to rescind it without meeting

the necessary procedures. The upshot of this is that although John Roberts has not been reborn as a liberal, he has been reborn as a Chief Justice, fully willing to provide the deciding vote alongside liberals on the Court to hold Donald Trump accountable to the rule of law and to assure the principle that the President is no different than anybody else when it comes to confronting the rule

of law. At the same time, Roberts is demonstrating his long standing concern that the Supreme Court not be seen as partisan political and indeed, by crossing party lines, Roberts has demonstrated that in his own case definitively and for the historical record, Robert's transformation has been little short of extraordinary, and I promise to return to it in a future episode. Until the next time I speak to you, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to

you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Jane Cott, with mastering by Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gera special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Loebell. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. And

one last thing. I just wrote a book called The Arab Winter Patragedy. I would be delighted if you checked it out. If you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. You can always let me know what you think on Twitter. My handle is Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background