Covid compels a rethink on cities
Far from rendering major cities obsolete, the pandemic forced the mayor of Paris to quickly implement pedestrianisation as an urban design innovation. With thoughtful planning, similar bold transformations can happen in other cities
Rue de Rivoli, a boulevard running through the heart of Paris, has been developed in fits and starts. Napoleon Bonaparte initiated construction in 1802, after years of planning and debate, but work stalled following the emperor’s abdication in 1814. The boulevard remained in limbo until another military strongman, Napoleon III, completed the project in the 1850s. The next century, construction began again — this time, to accommodate cars. But this past spring, Rue de Rivoli experienced its fastest transformation yet.
With Paris traffic subdued by a Covid-19 lockdown, the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, decided on 30 April to close the three-kilometre-long road to cars in order to create more space for pedestrians and bicyclists. Workers repainted the road and transformed a major artery in central Paris — home of the world-renowned Louvre museum — virtually overnight.
It was not just Rue de Rivoli. Using only paint and screw-in markers, more than 150km of Parisian roads were temporarily reallocated to cyclists in the early months of the pandemic — a revolution in urban reprogramming. It was later announced that the changes would become permanent.
The Parisian example highlights the extent to which the pandemic has accelerated the pace of urban innovation, compressing what would have taken years into months or even weeks. Beyond highlighting the flaws in prepandemic urban systems — such as high levels of pollution — it has allowed city leaders to bypass cumbersome bureaucracy, and respond much more efficiently to the needs of people and businesses. Those needs are changing fast.
One of the most discussed changes relates to the separation of home and work. In the early days of urbanisation, people walked to work. Later, they began to take public transport. Only after World War II and the rise of suburbanisation did people begin to drive cars from their homes to giant factory complexes and office towers.
During the pandemic, remote work has become the rule in many industries — and many companies plan to keep it that way, at least to an extent. This reintegration of work and home threatens one of the last remaining vestiges of the Industrial Age: central business districts that pack and stack office workers in skyscrapers.
With many workers unlikely to return to their cubicles, old office towers may be transformed into much-needed affordable housing after the pandemic. One-dimensional business districts could become vibrant neighbourhoods.
Non-work activities have been transformed as well. Dining, entertainment, and fitness have increasingly been moving into the open air, occupying space that used to be designated for cars. So, as with the bike lanes in Paris, the pandemic is creating prototypes for a permanently post-automobile, humancentric city. In fact, the changes in Paris are part of a broader plan to create a “15-minute city” (ville du quart d’heure), where core daily activities — including working, learning and shopping — can be carried out just a short walk or bike ride from home.
So, far from rendering cities obsolete, as some predicted early on, the pandemic has unlocked an ever-broader potential for renaissance — what the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction” on an urban scale. The crisis left governments with little choice but to adopt a fast-paced, trial-and-error approach. The extraordinary innovations in pedestrianisation, affordable housing, and dynamic zoning that have emerged highlight the power of positive feedback loops.
Nonetheless, a Schumpeterian approach is experimental; and even the best-designed experiments sometimes fail. Moreover, the costs of those failures are not borne equally: those with the least influence tend to suffer the most.
The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, has disproportionately affected the poor and vulnerable.
In South Africa, Dr Warren Smit of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town says: “It has highlighted the need for upgrading informal settlements, and also the need to move towards more participatory and collaborative governance mechanisms — which could include community-generated data and digital platforms, but will need to be much more than that.”
In this new age of urban innovation, leaders must take great care to minimise the risks to — and redistribute the returns toward — disadvantaged and vulnerable groups. That means, first and foremost, listening to them. The Black Lives Matter movement in the US is a powerful example of a disadvantaged group demanding to be heard. Leaders everywhere should pay attention and address racial and class divides head-on. Urban design is central to any such strategy.
To support this process — and help maintain flexibility and speed in urban innovation after the pandemic — leaders should consider creating participatory digital platforms to enable residents to communicate their needs.
This could encourage policies that improve quality of life in cities — especially disadvantaged neighbourhoods — including by limiting problematic trends like rising pollution and gentrification. Only with an agile and inclusive approach can we seize this once-in-a-century opportunity — or, rather, meet our urgent obligation — to build back better.
A stroll along Rue de Rivoli today reveals none of the desolation and dullness we have come to expect on city streets during the pandemic. Instead, the storied boulevard is bustling with masked Parisians, zooming along on bikes, scooters, e-bikes, and rollerblades or pausing for coffee at cafes and restaurants.
A street deadened by the pandemic has been revived. With thoughtful planning, bold experimentation, and luck, such transformations can be just the start for cities everywhere. — © Project Syndicate
With workers unlikely to return to cubicles, old office towers may be transformed into much-needed affordable housing
Carlo Ratti is cofounder of the design and innovation office Carlo Ratti Associati and director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT. Richard Florida is professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management
It was during the middle of last year, when the reality of the pandemic’s permanence in our lives took root, that food activist and chef Mokgadi Itsweng launched her Uju Spice brand online. “Catering had dried up, and morale was at an all-time low. I found myself with nothing to lose,” she says of her decision to pickle and sell locally grown chou moellier kale.
“Nobuhle Ndongeni, an organic farmer in the Magaliesberg, had kilos of chou moellier, also known as chomolia or Zimbabwean kale and similar to morogo, that were starting to rot because all produce orders, even at markets, came to a halt, you’ll remember,” she says. This led to Itsweng’s idea to use what she could salvage to create a spicy atchar. It became one of her best sellers.
As the lockdown and associated restrictions that seeped into the new year swung wildly between the unknown, a numbing familiarity and then back into uncharted territory as our freedoms shrank in the face of communal responsibility, Itsweng’s story replayed in my mind.
Journalist and social worker Eilene Zimmerman, in a New York Times article last year, expounds on the characteristics and attributes that research has established make for better resilience in times of adversity. This includes a positive and realistic attitude, spiritual or religious affiliation, an altruistic nature, the ability to accept a situation and a strong network of support.
But what if the cards tower too high against us?
We cling to the success stories, however tiny the victory, because our ability to survive lies here — in hope.
I think too, of the restaurant newsletters pinging into my inbox soon after every “family meeting” with President Cyril Ramaphosa: offers of beautifully packaged, reasonably priced meals delivered to your door, two-for-one specials to entice lunchtime diners, fine-dining establishments touting burgers, eateries serving simpler meals in well-ventilated areas, and specials sold in advance of alcohol sales reopening.
I’ve marvelled at the dizzying twists and jagged pivots, as well as the capital required to keep afloat in the restaurant and hospitality industries. I have commiserated with my colleagues and friends over the understandable but heart-breaking closures of our solid favourite restaurants, many of them final.
The restaurant industry in South Africa has faced a loss of about 3 000 closures. The statistics are yet to be established for caterers, market stallholders, informal vendors, smallscale farmers, migrant and other workers employed during harvest seasons (grape, and others). Hardest hit in the restaurant industry have been the staff members — chefs, line cooks and service workers, as well as the numerous suppliers, maintenance and farm workers. Most of these people labour in silence, invisible to the general diner.
At its best, the restaurant industry is a circular economy with the power to endow and profit multiple players. At its worst, it’s a pit of despair in a downward spiralling mire, with few options open to the historically disenfranchised, many of whom have dedicated decades of their lives to its growth. Those with the most to lose are black, working-class women.
I’m reminded of a line from James Baldwin’s essay Dark Days: “How slowly the mills of justice grind if one is black.” And there can be no justice for as long as socioeconomic disparity of this extent endures. The pandemic has exposed the profound fault lines in our weakest areas as a nation. What we are served is a dish lying stone cold on the kitchen table.
But resilience and adaptation in the face of necessity and circumstance are achingly familiar to South Africans. The dishes we prepare today carry these stories of survival in their history and origin.
Think of langsouskos (long sauce food, made to stretch), prepared with a small amount of meat; tinned fish used in breyani, larger servings of starch, such as pap, to fill the belly; dehydrated meat and vegetables. Even relishes and pickles such as Itsweng’s have traditionally served to sustain us in the lean, cold months.
In the cookbook Cape, Curry and Koesisters, Fatima Sydow recalls her 1980s childhood in Manenberg on the Cape Flats. “We were six kids and times were tough. And like many of our neighbours, a slice of dry bread with sugar sprinkled over … was a common thing. This went well with a cup of weak tea, at most times made from a tea bag that was already soaked and dried a few times over.”
Chef and African food pioneer Dorah Sitole spoke candidly about the hunger and poverty of her early childhood years in Dorah Sitole: 40 Years of Iconic Food. This influenced her frugal adaptations and commonsense simplifications of dishes for a largely black audience of readers when she was at True Love and Drum magazines and working as a culinary brand ambassador in her later years.
But where do we turn when the days are marred by interminable uncertainty, and a mutating virus holds hope hostage?
In African American chef Edna Lewis’s 1976 classic cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, she immortalises Freetown, Virginia, a farming community of freed slaves, dividing the year according to the farming calendar. She speaks about a community that saw the value in the land thriving well for the benefit of all, and about the return of young people to farm the land again in a slow and meaningful way. A return to the land (and of the land) is crucial for a more just food system, but it seems more out of reach than ever.
The local magazine spreads of young to middle-aged white professionals leaving lucrative careers or pandemic dead-ends to hobby-farm, self-sustaining estates hemmed in by majestic mountains and ample water
sources, along with horses, pigs and chickens roaming freely like the “running” chickens of my childhood, are a painful reminder of our seismic socioeconomic rift. The wealthy have the luxury of resilience in ways the poor could never dare dream of.
The resistance that I have found most encouragement from in these dire times have been the tiny shifts I’ve witnessed. The pickle makers. The start-up magazine covering the vast and lesser-publicised culinary heritage of home cooks. The restaurateur closing shop and then successfully selling homemade condiments. The young cookbook authors entertaining a homebound audience on Instagram’s IGTV (the new Netflix for cooks, I’ve been told). A chef who was always too busy to celebrate special holidays, enjoying a Valentine’s dinner with the beloved he met during lockdown.
When I look back to the most excruciating part of the pandemic for myself, my resilience and my own survival took root in the smallest of acts — baking sourdough bread and feeling connected to a global community with mutual struggles (starters are their own bosses), reaching out to colleagues with a word of comfort, speaking on the phone to friends, sending chocolates to loved ones I wouldn’t see for more than a year, watching series with zero room for the usual guilt I feel for “not being productive”.
Our stories may not all be of grand gestures and noteworthy mentions, but I believe that resilience lives in the everyday — rolling out of bed on mornings when the world seems cruel and menacing, being kind to others and oneself, cooking an improvised family meal, trying day after day, in spite of it all.
M&G’S
What happens when our national youth development strategy is to connect young people to jobs, and there are no jobs to connect them to? Then we sit with a 50% unemployment rate among 18-to-34-year-olds and fear the ticking time bomb. Perhaps our concern is not so much the potential for a grassroots civil uprising as the inexorable growth of populist movements that harness simmering discontent in pursuit of power.
But if we define the challenge so narrowly — the need to give young people jobs so that they will not become angry — we will continue to be on a losing wicket. Then we will try to fill the leaky bucket with training courses and “job opportunities” in the form of workplace experiences and public employment programmes. These are essential components, because we must create opportunities that build a sense of real and imminent possibility. But if we don’t get it right; if the experience is underwhelming and ends in culde-sacs, then young people will feel even more alienated.
As Robert Sapolsky points out in his book, Behave, young people’s minds experience higher-thanexpected rewards more positively than adults, but interpret smallerthan-expected rewards aversely. In other words, even if they derive some benefit from smaller-than-anticipated reward, they can regard it as unpleasant enough to cause resentment. Strategies for youth development must pay as much attention to young people’s minds as they do the material options available to them.
Populist movements don’t just harness the young people’s discontent; they embody their identity, create a sense of belonging and imbue their aspirations. Sometimes they even go further, appealing to their heightened propensity for violence and risk-taking.
Why do the Economic Freedom Fighters appeal so strongly to young people, whereas the ANC Youth League seems to have lost its way? It would be naive and insulting to those young people who support the EFF to think that their main reason for doing so is the promise of instant jobs, should that party be voted into power. The distinction between these parties goes beyond the plausibility of promises to their grasp of the psyche of young people.
The EFF taps into their desire for identity, belonging, affirmation and reward, whereas, looking in from the outside, material reward seems to have been the main consideration for the ANC Youth League over the past 20 years. No wonder it has lost ground: its ordinary members must inevitably feel disappointed.
I am using these political parties to illustrate a point, but my argument is not political. It speaks not to the ideologies of these organisations, but to the way in which they engage their constituencies. They represent the starkest contrasts I can muster to argue that unless we understand young people, we will miss the opportunity to reconstruct our future.
To be fair, everyone argues for their pet project, making claims of profound effects on economic growth and nation-building. I won’t claim special privilege for the acceleration of youth capital as a way out of our economic morass, but simply open it up to scrutiny: the future of this country depends on a rapid expansion of economic productivity to drive growth and reduce inequality — and productivity gains depend on human capital development.
There are two discrete opportunities to accelerate human-capital formation. They both involve maximising the capacities of the human brain, by investing properly in early childhood development (ECD) and by changing the lived experience of young people from that of alienation to inclusion.
In biological terms, ECD optimally develops the circuitry of all parts of the brain, including the limbic system that shapes emotions. The experience of adolescents and young adults then builds on the scaffolding laid down by ECD, continuing to shape the frontal cortex responsible for higher-order thinking and self-regulation. Human brains reach about 85% of adult volume by the age of two years, but the maturation of the frontal cortex continues until about the age of 25 years.
During late adolescence, grey matter is shaped in response to its environment, to make it more efficient and goal-directed. At the same time, more myelin — which forms white matter — is laid down, increasing the agility and connectedness of the brain. Sapolsky argues that this is the time when young people can break free of some of the shackles of their family’s past, because frontal cortex formation depends more on their lived experience than on their genes. It is a time of heightened activity, greater dynamism and more opportunity. Almost inevitably, that flux brings with it greater mental tumult, when hormonal and limbic systems tend to override the braking mechanisms of the evolving frontal cortex. That’s why young people are more willing to take risks and why peer pressure plays such a large part in their decisions.
The brains of young people should not be viewed as immature versions of those of adults, however. Dynamic neuroimaging has shown that the adolescent brain responds differently to specific stimuli — not only quantitatively different from younger children or adults, but sometimes even in the opposite direction.
For example, the response to rewards that differ from prior expectations, depends on the pattern of release of dopamine — the hormone responsible for pleasure. In younger children and older adults, there is a strong correlation between the size of the reward experienced and the amount of dopamine released — but every reward is associated with dopamine release. In young people, the less-than-expected reward actually triggers dopamine turnoff and makes them feel “less lekker” than if they’d foregone the reward entirely.
The differences in the brains of young people are not all negative. With greater tolerance of risk comes an embrace of novelty and creativity, which is why the poetry and art of young people is often so powerful and unsettling. It also enables them to take up new challenges that older people might shrink from.
It is the experience of life as a young person that most shapes their frontal cortex. But if we frame our responsibility for shaping that experience as “growing them up” — infusing their neurons with information and then connecting as many as possible to the world of work — we will always be in national arrears. Instead, we should ask how best to “grow them differently” — to capitalise on the different brain that characterises young people.
A starting point is to see school as a brain-development process and not an institutional funnel for academic exclusion. If South Africa’s combined human capital ultimately depends on the sum capacity of our frontal cortices, why do we tolerate a dropout of 40% from the schooling system? If those who dropped out found further opportunities, it would not be so bad. In fact, it would release the psychological pressure valve created by the status conferred on the matric exams. But most school drop-outs don’t find opportunity, and drift into a state of perpetual limbo.
Literally and figuratively, schooling should hold children until they complete it. This requires a mindset shift — teachers who urge children not to “perform”, but to “thrive”, and parents who understand that the love and support they give is every bit as powerful as the subject matter their children learn. And before anyone suggests that this psychosocial approach “dumbs down” education, I should note that it is associated with better academic outcomes.
Beyond schooling, any stepping stones for young people must be in reach of another. In a society of such structural constraint, we cannot expect them to navigate their way without help. Fortunately, there are some green shoots of hope, like the repositioning of the Community Work Programme and the prospect of a Social Employment Fund. These could create new pathways for personal growth and development. Instead of cutting grass in cemeteries, young people could become early-learning practitioners or assistant artisans. The rewards can become bigger than anticipated.
In addition to value-added vocational training and job creation, we must create the space for youth leadership and civic participation, beyond that offered through political structures. In this regard, the mainstream media has a major role. The notion that the shenanigans of political office-bearers are always more newsworthy than the innovation and enterprise of other networks of young people needs to be tested. After all, it is our young social innovators and entrepreneurs who are working out the future in their minds.
Instead of cutting grass in cemeteries, young people could become early-learning practitioners or assistant artisans