Is the City Itself the Problem?

Coronavirus is a novel threat, but to many it seems like a specifically urban threat. As architecture critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in the New York Times, it preys on people’s desire for social connection, warping cities’ great strength, density, into an “enemy.” The pandemic “revives America’s suburban instincts,” writes the Boston Globe. In its wake, urbanist gadfly Joel Kotkin giddily predicts, Americans will surely retreat to the cheap land, solo driving, and sense of safety in the suburbs.

But the diagnosis of Covid-19 as a uniquely urban problem reflects historical tropes about the dangers of urban space more than current evidence. Statistical analyses do not show a consistent connection between big-city density and coronavirus impacts. Some of the world’s most heavily settled spaces — Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore — have proved to be the most formidable at containing Covid-19. In the U.S., small towns in Georgia and Louisiana suffer along with New York City.

The demonization of density harkens to the heyday of urbanization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. American civic leaders and reformers of the time embraced the notion that urban social problems — disease, poverty, immorality — stemmed from the physical environments of cities. This ideology of “moral environmentalism,” as historian Alexander von Hoffman termed it, formed the foundation of U.S. urban planning and reform for decades. Now this legacy is re-emerging with coronavirus, threatening, as it did in recent urban history, to lead to distorted, ideological responses that malign city life and obscure the root of the problem.

The belief that the urban environment was “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man,” as Thomas Jefferson had famously written, reached a high point with the unprecedented urbanization of the 19th century. Between 1850 and 1900, New York grew more than sixfold to 3.4 million, Berlin quadrupled in size to 1.9 million, and Chicago — the “shock city” of the 19th century — grew nearly 60 times, to 1.7 million. In the United States, a rural society before the 20th century, the social changes were as profound as the physical ones. Observers noted the city’s physical disorder, crime, and disease, its extremes of poverty and wealth, and its startlingly diverse populations.