When we eventually overcome COVID-19 and emerge into a post-pandemic world, how will this
global experience change the way we look at cities and urban areas?
And what implications will that have on our ability to address climate change?
Dr. Alexandros Tsamis is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, and Associate
Director of the Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
He joins us to look at the opportunities to reinvent cities, and what that can mean for
the environment.
Thanks so much for taking some time for us today.
Thank you very much, Sharon, for having me on your show.
2020 has been a year for reexamining our priorities and realizing what matters most.
And it's become clear that our cities are really not built for a pandemic.
What have been the biggest pain points from an urban planning perspective?
It is very true, right.
2020 has been rather uncomfortable to say the least.
If COVID-19 had a mission, I think that mission would be to question the very basis of what
cities are made of and why they're there, COVID-19 is anti-city, I would say.
If you think about it, cities are there to foster security.
They're there to promote health.
They're there to foster our need to be social creatures.
And they're there to obviously provide economic opportunity for innovation and prosperity.
From this list, all of those things are under negotiation right now.
We are suffering from the economic growth, we are suffering from the sense of community,
all of those things are under question.
So the pain I would say is kind of transversal.
It has to do with understanding what are we expecting from our cities to do.
And it's not a new concept.
This is not the first one they make that has questioned the city as a concept.
From ancient times, pandemics in ancient Greek would question the concept of a city as well.
So it is again one of those topics that we have to discuss.
Well, are steps are being taken to make cities more livable during a pandemic right now?
There are a few things that are actually quite exciting, in my opinion.
I don't know if you have noticed, but there are a lot of areas in urban environments in
which we have claimed back some of the areas that usually belong to cars.
In order for restaurants to operate, we have allowed restaurants to be on the street.
And that is a kind of a wonderful thing as a possible future for the city, given the
fact that cars might also move out of the city at some point in the near future.
Also, there are cities in the world which have increased their bike lanes, they have
prioritized transportation through bicycle.
That's another thing that has health benefits, environmental benefits, all of these kinds
of things.
Obviously, one thing that is kind of detrimental is that we have also observed that these opportunities
are not equally given to everybody in a city.
We have observed that neighborhoods or communities that are more economically challenged, have
less of those opportunities than everybody else.
And this is something that has raised an awareness about their own urban planning in the future,
and how we can ensure some sort of an equitable distribution of all of the resources available
to their inhabitants.
Well, the pandemic knows no borders, it’s affected every corner of the world and every
industry.
How is COVID-19 changing the way architects and urban planners are thinking about future
cities?
Well, this is a question that is multifaceted, there are so many things that are changing
possibly, nothing can be said with absolute determination, obviously, because they are
not predictable things.
But in most cases, what we see is that, for example, retail is put under a lot of pressure
today.
And that means that maybe cities in the future, if we are convinced that we don't want to
go outside and shop anymore, and that the internet is enough of a provider for our goods,
then possibly urban planning will have to reconsider the first level, the ground floor
of all cities, because it's not going to look like shops anymore.
It might look like restaurants and bars and gyms and services and things that are not
about buying things.
But I'm pretty sure they're not going to be about buying stuff.
Another one that is a little bit more abstract in a way is the fact that in order to deal
with COVID, we have relied a lot on collecting data for the city.
In order to monitor the pandemic and understand where there are sources of spreading the disease,
we have relied a lot on getting data from the citizens.
I recently received a notification on my cell phone that I can download an application that
kind of transmits who I have been close to that might have COVID, I would have to register
whether I have COVID or not.
This kind of situation has made urban planners are aware that any kind of data that we collect
from citizens can become useful for future development of cities.
Obviously, there is a flip side to this coin, the known issues about privacy, that we can't
invade the privacy of people in order to collect this data.
But nevertheless, a dream that has been alive for the past 10 or 15 years, with all of this
data revolution in the world.
COVID showed us that it's possible that we can take action if we harness data correctly.
And the big elephant in the room obviously as a change that is possible and that planners
are thinking that might affect the cities is obviously the way we live and the way we
work.
Well, many people are saying that remote work is here to stay, do you think it's going to
become the norm?
And how is that going to affect downtown cores and office buildings?
Well, again, to predict whether it's going to become the norm is difficult.
The thing is that, the idea of working remotely existed long before this pandemic, ever since
ever since the internet was in our conscious minds as a possible future.
Even before we had it in our homes, there were already urban planners that were imagining
a city that was not about commuting to work.
And density being redefined in a different way, not based on the way we live and the
way we work.
What COVID has done is that it has shown us that it is possible.
And we hear more and more every day companies of different sizes, the progressive ones,
and the less progressive ones, that say that it is a possible future.
It doesn't mean that the office environment is going to completely collapse or it's going
to get extinct.
It means that you're not going to use your office on a day-to-day basis.
You might use it for meetings, you might use it for social gatherings around the home.
And also it doesn't mean that it is going to be extinct.
It means that it is going to migrate.
It's not going to exist in your office, but it can exist in your home.
It is going to exist in your neighborhood restaurant, in your neighborhood café and
bar.
And these are kinds of things that already existed even before COVID.
And they just became more apparent with the COVID situation.
Looking at the environment, the pandemic has had a positive side effect on climate change,
global emissions back in April, in fact, we're down 30%, gas consumption was down.
But it hasn't all been positive hasn't.
No, of course it hasn't been positive.
There is a tendency right now for people to go live outside the cities because they're
afraid and it's understandable, it is a pandemic, you can get sick.
For some it is a life-threatening situation.
But from a climate change perspective, a city density is what is required because it is
more energy efficient.
It is more energy efficient to live in large cities, than to live in urban sprawl.
And if you want to understand it from a very basic point of view, homes in cities are smaller.
The amount of energy you need to heat them and cool them is much less than in a suburb.
There is no idea of a garden in the same way, you don't use water in the same way.
All of these kinds of lifestyle decisions affect the way we use our resources.
And the biggest question that arises here is that yes, the pandemic is a natural disaster,
let's say, that is spread worldwide and everybody has felt it.
But also, climate change is something that is happening at a slower pace, it is not in
our conscious minds the same way this pandemic is, nevertheless, it is common knowledge right
now that it is happening.
And that is a much bigger threat to our own existence than what is happening right now
with COVID.
So to address climate change through the design of our cities, is very, very, very important.
One has to think that already, we're talking about cities that are not energy efficient.
And at the same time, we also know that the population on the planet is growing drastically,
we are 7 billion people today.
And the UN says that we are going to be 11 billion by 2100.
That population is going to move into cities, because you get the economic opportunities,
and so on.
And this is a registered tendency that happens globally.
We won't be able to manage the climate crisis situation, if we abandon the idea of urban
density, if we abandon the idea of a sharing economy, sharing transportation, sharing public
space, sharing a working environment, which are all things that are positive for the environment.
So will future cities then need to reflect efforts to address both issues, reduced emissions
as well as built in resilience against something like the pandemic?
I think that the pandemic will be dealt with, this specific one I mean, will be dealt with
medicine, will be dealt with other disciplines.
The cities have always been designed to promote our health, sanitation, water, access to fresh
air, to lighting, all of these things are deeply rooted in the way we design cities
today.
These are not going to get extinct.
There are some lessons to be learned about things we have done because of COVID.
We have occupied the street, we have allowed the car not to be in our daily lives the same
way it was before, that I think we can use as examples of what is possible for a different
kind of city in the future.
We need to emerge from this crisis on the right foot to effectively tackle the task
at hand when it comes to climate change.
And Dr. Tsamis, we thank you so much for sharing your expertise with Newspoint today.
Very insightful.
Thank you very much for having me, Sharon.