Cureosities | The Future, Vol. 2: Cities

The dialogue around returning to work seems to center primarily around two parties - the employers (owners, leadership, etc) and the employees (those not making policy decisions) - within the minority of workers that are actually able to work remotely (for more on this, see The Future, Vol. 1). On some level, sure, that’s what this is about, but in looking around, there’s much more to the discussion. In only looking at the dichotomy within companies, we’re missing huge swaths of people affected by the outcome of this argument. I’m not the first to discuss this, but it’s important to bring focus to the all the other groups impacted by the remote/hybrid/in-office work discussion. Communities of all scales are a result of their populations, and what’s happened with remote working is a shift in locale from centrally located workplaces to dispersed, home-centric locations. The work week populations of cities have been significantly reduced because in American cities, for better or worse, we tend to have separation between where we live and where we work. This is generalizing a bit, but if we had more vibrant downtowns with significant resident populations, our cities wouldn’t be as impacted by the vacating of the office workers. In addition, office workers might be less averse to coming into the office due to an easier commute time and wanting to be out and about in their own neighborhoods, but I digress. That will be a topic for a later post.

In researching, I read an analysis of urban economics, and one of the first points was a recognition that “cities are first and foremost places - agglomerations of people - rather than economic and political units.” As simple as that is, it’s an important reminder that a city is not a city without its population - its people and its businesses. There’s nothing specific you can point to in Seattle to say “that’s what makes Seattle the city that it is”. In addition there’s no singular person or business you can point to, it would be ridiculous to even try, and so each and every person that lives in Seattle, to a certain degree, makes it the city that it is. What the move to remote work did, for all the right reasons in trying to maneuver the pandemic, was pull our city populations out and keep them in their homes. Maybe their homes were in less dense areas of the city proper or maybe they were in suburbs. In some case, they even moved to other states or countries because they were easily able to live in one place and work in another, often leaving due to rising costs of living.

Pre-pandemic image from West Seattle of vibrant downtown at night.

Our downtown populations were gutted. There were far fewer eyes on the downtown streets, crime increased, and our downtowns became places to fear rather than joyful destinations. All the bodegas and coffee shops were still there, unable to maneuver such a drastic and immediate change, but they had fewer customers, and eventually many of them had to close up shop - another population reduction from the downtown. At the peak of the lockdown, our downtowns were scary. I went on a drive with my children as an excuse to get out of the house, and going into Seattle’s Pioneer Square for the first time in months felt like an alternate universe, with all the shop fronts covered in plywood, many with colorful murals already defaced with graffiti, so many tents and shopping carts and people in heart wrenching situations.

This is what we had to come back from, and in large part, we have. Between social programs, city policies, workers and shop owners coming back, there is more vitality in our urban cores than there has been in the last three years. Seattle’s Pioneer Square is better than it was, but we aren’t there yet. The reason people come to downtowns is because they offer something that they can’t get elsewhere. Retail has historically been a draw, but with changing shopping habits starting pre-pandemic and then COVID bringing shuttered shops that never again, it doesn’t appear that it’s going to be the draw it once was. There is a web of impact that I can’t say I understand fully, but with high vacancies and high interest rates, office building owners are pausing investment and, in some cases, walking away from their properties due to buildings being worth less than they owe. Un- or underoccupied buildings create many issues for our built environment, but one of the primary issues goes back to Jane Jacobs in her urbanist manifesto, The Death and Life of Great American Cities - if there are not well-intentioned eyes on the street that care about preserving civility and the safety of the neighborhood, the safety and perceptions of safety will plummet. We need to bolster our urban populations, and without workers having a reason to come back to the office, the cities will be in a continual state of catch up.

So you might ask, why do we even need cities? Why can’t we all just live in our distributed locations? I understand asking the question, but consider the alternative. There’s a historical investment in every city that we can’t collectively just turn our backs on. Sure, you don’t need to go there every day, but if cities were to fail, we end up with abandoned, foreclosed or vacant properties left to decay. We can look at Detroit* as a recent example of what happens when previously vibrant cities fall. Due to the decentralization of the auto industry and detrimental urban planning that unfairly targeted lower income neighborhoods, Detroit went from the 4th largest city in the US in the 1950’s to the 27th in the last census. The city became unstable. Buildings were fenced off and left to decay, with fully a third of Detroit’s land mass currently still sitting vacant. Those with money and privilege flew to the suburbs. But those without were left to the instability and insecurity that remained, with little access to necessary services and food. Recently, there has been more investment in the city, but it has not been holistically successful, taking a lens similar to urban renewal “projects” from the mid-1900’s where they were made FOR communities rather than WITH communities. The design process of urban investments must include the people these spaces are being made for or they rarely succeed (for a crash course on successful community engagement, look into the Design Assistance Teams from the Architects Foundation, it’s a fantastic program).

Today, even with that extensive financial investment in the city, Detroit is one of the most dangerous places in the United States. On a total crime index of 1 - 100, with 100 being the safest, Detroit receives a 1. Your chances of being a victim of violent crime is 1 in 43, and when you include property crime, the chances of being a victim rises to 1 in 17. Safety is one of the most basic rights that should be protected, and Detroit shows what can happen to the right to safety when a city falls into decline. I’m not saying that I think all cities are on the verge of collapse, but I’m afraid it’s more tenuous than generally perceived. Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013, but its population peaked in the 1950’s. It was a slow decline that snuck up on them.

I believe that we owe it to our collective humanity to consider our full populations and not just our immediate spheres. With city populations and density, we support each other. There are resources and communities that wouldn’t be able to thrive if we all lived in little bubbles. What cities do is bring diverse people together, comingling, interacting and learning from one another. We see a more full spectrum of humanity and that opens our minds and hearts to what people can be. Without cities, we would lose our centers of innovation, creativity and diversity of thought. If we all receded into like-minded silos, echo chambers and fear of the “other” would abound even more so than it already has in our current political climate. Some argue that the reason we are the biological evolution that we are, having beat out all other species that existed within our genus, is that we can tell stories. We work together, we communicate, we learn and we can pass along what we’ve learned to the next generations, and these stories are far more rich, diverse and educating when we have a more thorough understanding of the wide spectrum of humanity.

All of this is to say that human existence is bolstered by connection and a feeling of belonging. We often dread going to social events, especially in the great awkward that followed lockdown, but as much as some people might resist it, we become stronger and more whole when we interact with others, especially those with a differing viewpoint than our own. Even the simple, cordial exchange with your local barista can improve your mood purely based on that moment of community. These interactions pull us out of our internal narratives. While connection can and does happen via the internet, it’s much more difficult to foster than when you’re directly communicating with someone in person.

I know we’re in a state of reimagining what work can and should be, and I fully believe in rethinking the many expectations and perspectives around “Work”. We should not, however, fully discount the benefit of in-person interaction, both for our own good and that of our larger communities. We need spaces and places to have these interactions with other people, destinations that foster random interactions and connections with people that don’t know each other (yet). Again going back to Jane Jacobs, the design of spaces can be supportive of community, or it can destroy it. While we’re rethinking what work is, how we can work together, we must rethink space as well in order to address the full equation. More to come on that, but I hope there is a strong, collective consideration for the impacts of these decisions on the many communities outside of the employee/employer dynamic.

*Detroit - I want to acknowledge that there is a lot of complexity to the issues of what happened with Detroit over the years, including redlining, low-income displacement, racist policies toward homeownership, the list goes on. I am simplifying for the sake of the primary point of valuing cities and what they are able to do for our communities, and I hope there is no disrespect taken toward the city and citizens of Detroit.