Changes small and large—parklets, outdoor restaurants, bike lanes—could remake our relationship to cities (and help fix climate change).
greenhouse gas than suburbs do . So basically cars pump out lung-destroying particles and an invisible gas that, if it builds up to high enough levels in the atmosphere, besets the planet with disasters and makes the whole place less inhabitable. The planetBut any attempt to shift away from car-centric cities, even in this small way, was—as University of Iowa law professor Greg Shill puts it— a “classic diffuse benefits/concentrated costs problem.
Then Covid happened. “As is often the case with disruption, we had much more rapid change than anyone would have expected,” Shill says. “One of the barriers that fell faster than anybody expected was legal and institutional opposition to repurposing streets.”taking outdoor space away from cars isn’t just an infectious-disease issue or an aesthetic one. It’s also about equity.
Certainly, keeping restaurants and other services open during a pandemic means the people who work there get exposed to customers and their diseases all day long. “During the early stages of the pandemic, there was a lot of disagreement about the equity impacts of, for example, expanding sidewalk space for restaurants. I think there were a lot of people suggesting that somehow that was against the interests of essential workers,” says Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute.
If any of that convinces you that, hey, cities should be denser, with more housing and transit close to jobs, and with lots of public space—well, you’re probably a Democrat. Since the pandemic began, Americans have become, further away from schools, stores, and restaurants—and each other. In 2019, 53 percent of Americans agreed with that sentiment; by July of 2021, the ratio was 60-39. But those numbers mask a partisan split, one that has also worsened during the pandemic.
Even with those opinions on the books, the pandemic—or really, the haphazard response to it—has shifted people’s perceptions of what a city can be. “As a species, we are not great at imagining things we’ve never seen, and the vast majority of North Americans have really only seen automobile-dominated, single-family homes as the way we build things,” says Shoshanna Saxe, an engineer at the University of Toronto who studies sustainable infrastructure. “That wasn’t the only option.
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