Will Urban life survive the coronavirus outbreak?

Can city life survive a pandemic? Yes, it can.

For those who caught the reference to the New York Times article, no, I don’t think urban life will change forever after the Covid-19 pandemic. It will advance on its course, yes, but the solution for the crisis won’t be blaming cities for their density.

While the way a virus, such as covid-19, gets transmitted is by human contact and the aspects we value about our cities is based on the same notion, history shows that although times like these made people stay away from cities and city life, the density we need to avoid now is what makes possible the social, economic and scientific advances that make us great.

But cities are not a modern invention, they didn’t emerge from the economic advantages that they possess. Since the beginning of our time, we have organized ourselves in dense concentrations of people.

Cities emerged because, socially, it makes more sense. This is our instinct to congregate, as we see advantages in being close to others, so this concentration produces convenience and therefore it makes the places we live in feel diverse, warm, and alive.

We need to stay physically distant at this moment. Pandemics are anti-urban on the response phase we’re in, but after the worst part has passed we’ll need to recover and work together, for when doing so we exploit our capability to solve problems of any kind, to support each other and to be resilient and this is what we should be looking for.

“Cities were once the most helpless and devastated victims of disease, but they became great disease conquerors. All the apparatus of surgery, hygiene, microbiology, chemistry, telecommunications, public health measures, teaching and research hospitals, ambulances and the like, which people not only in cities but also outside them depend upon for the unending war against premature mortality, are fundamentally products of big cities and would be inconceivable without big cities…” Jane Jacobs

But let’s not take this the other way around, we need isolation so we can break the virus’ chains of transmission, we need to support our doctors, nurses and the people out there that can’t afford to stop working. At this moment, the best way of taking care of each other is to stay home and to work in our comfy clothes, we have to remember this is a phase, we’ll recover and then we’ll need each other.