The silver lining of Covid-19 is that it might push our societies to address the huge challenges — socio-economic, political, environmental and digital — facing us, some of which the pandemic has intensified. If we do indeed manage to “build back better”, it will largely happen at the level of cities.
There are many reasons why cities are where the action must be. One is that the pandemic struck particularly hard at the functioning of cities. Their whole raison d’être being close human contact, they were most disrupted by the imperative of social distancing. That leaves them no choice but to address that disruption as well as the possibility that the post-coronavirus use of city centres will be different from the status quo ante.
The shock clearly prompted many cities to accelerate changes they were already putting in place to prepare for a world where improving “liveability” — and in particular reducing reliance on the personal car — is not just forced by the climate challenge but can be a source of economic competitiveness for early movers. (My colleague Simon Kuper has summarised what these changes are likely to look like, in an essay on the path to the post-Covid city.)
But another more straightforward reason why cities will be where change must happen is that that’s where most people live. According to UN data, about 56 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas — almost double the share in 1950 — and more than two-thirds will do so by 2050. For high-income countries the share is 82 per cent, set to rise to 88 per cent in the next three decades.
If only for arithmetic reasons, the changes in behaviour required to become greener, more digital and more inclusive will, therefore, largely amount to changes in the behaviour of city dwellers. Systemic transformations will take place city by city.
This puts Europe in a special position. Not just because the ambition to decarbonise in a socially inclusive way has taken stronger root there than in other regions. But also because of its unusual style of urbanisation.
Across the world, more than half of urban residents (59 per cent and rising) live in cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants; 43 per cent live with a million other people or more. In Europe, however, a stable majority (57 per cent) of the urban population still live in towns of fewer than 300,000 inhabitants, and only a quarter in cities of more than 1m.
That makes for a unique combination. Europe is one of the world’s most urbanised regions, with three-quarters of its citizens living in urban areas today, a share projected to reach 84 per cent by mid-century. Only North and South America have a somewhat larger share of city dwellers. But Europe does cities at the decidedly smallest scale: every other region relies much more on metropolises and megacities for their urbanisation.
This could prove a big asset in “building back better”. Smaller cities are nimbler than megacities (or they have no excuse not to be) in terms of adopting new technology, experimenting with planning reform, and rethinking traffic and building management, for example. Their smaller size also makes it easier for them to manage the political contestation that big change always brings with it in a democratic way.
That makes European cities ideal laboratories for social and political change. Not only do a large number of smaller cities make it possible to try out a lot of different policy experiments; manageable scale should also make it easier for other cities to adopt what pioneering ones have shown works.
What would it take to make the most of this asset? At the level of the cities themselves, policies for green and digital transformation should look favourably on solutions that are easily transferable elsewhere. Leaders should also set themselves up for copying what has worked elsewhere, either in their own policy formulation or in letting private sector actors easily scale up successful products. The journey planner app Citymapper, for example, started in London but has expanded very successfully to other cities that have pursued open data standards for their public transport.
Much depends on other levels of governments, too. National authorities should ensure that cities have the right planning and tax powers, defined over the optimal territory, to be bold in their efforts to innovate. And in the EU, European authorities should create incentives for scaling up local successes quickly. This is a matter of designing subsidies and funding from the EU budget, but above all to streamline regulations so that local tech innovation automatically has an EU-wide market.
Adapting the old admonition, what it all amounts to is to think globally while acting locally.
Other readables
In my column this week, I point out the geopolitical implications of fiscal policy: President Joe Biden’s massive stimulus will delay China’s catch-up with the US, but Europe’s timidity is hastening its relative decline.
The FT is running a series of in-depth articles on the hydrogen economy. The first three pieces analyse the efforts to scale up production of the gas, how carmakers are (or not) embracing hydrogen and the prospects for hydrogen-powered aviation.
In the latest instalment of the FT’s Economists Exchange series, my colleague Martin Arnold interviews the ECB’s chief economist Philip Lane.
Numbers news
The FT has the numbers on how fast the US is pulling ahead of other high-income countries.
Source: Economy - ft.com
