April 2020: What Does Our Future Look Like?
“Porchrait” captured by Neil Zeller
Dear neighbors,
I hope you are safe and healthy (physically and mentally) and at home as we weather this unprecedented situation together, yet apart. Like so many other plans that COVID-19 has postponed, cancelled, and altered in ways we’ve yet to understand, the Team Ward 9 communications plan lies in shambles. My essay on the importance of ward boundaries to the project of building a great city of Great Neighbourhoods went over like a lead balloon with many people stressed out about the magnitude of our current situation. So I’m not going to subject you to my previously scheduled thoughts on regional planning at this point.
What I’m going to do instead is share some of my preliminary thoughts on the magnitude of COVID-19 and begin considering the impact it will have on our Great Neighbourhoods mission. Your Team Ward 9 is scheduled to undertake our semi-annual strategic planning session on April 17 and we’ve decided to shift our focus outwards into that broadest level of consideration. As I begin to frame that conversation in my own mind, I wanted to share my thoughts with you and solicit your feedback:
One of the things I find myself saying a lot these days to people I interact with (from 2 meters of minimum distancing) is, “Remarkable times. . .” If a conversation ensues, I’ll say something along the lines of, “the mind reels at the potential changes this will effect in our lives and on our society.” The maddening nature of COVID-19, and particularly the lockdown, is that this crisis is unfolding in slow motion. The idea that I believe captures its nature in a Calgarian frame of reference is that the 2013 flood was a sprint, and this is a marathon. And while it’s plodding and exhausting and numbing and painful, we have the time to think and consider.
To my thinking, this is a situation exactly like what I always say about point two of Great Neighbourhoods -
that our Neighbourhoods are always changing and our choices are to:
1) wait to see what happens,
2) engage in the fool's errand of trying to prevent change/maintain the status quo, or
3) roll up our sleeves and work with our neighbours to effect the change that makes the most sense and does the most good.
Whole societies change much differently and generally, more slowly than neighbourhoods but we’re at a point of societal change and those three choices lie before us. We’d be foolish not to discuss, identify, and drive the change that makes the most sense and does the most good.
One of the core objectives of Great Neighbourhoods is to put us onto a footing where we are maximally set up to survive and thrive long into an uncertain future.
A conversation that’s challenging the very heart of Great Neighbourhoods is whether they’re needed, or even safe, in an age of pandemics. People are suggesting that lower density lifestyles may be safer - the hammering that China, Italy, and NYC are taking from COVID-19 superficially bears this out. But I am 100% confident that this line of argument will not stand in the face of the increasing amounts of data that is rolling in on that subject.
In the first place, Western Civilization specifically, but human civilization more generally, was born out of and cradled within Great Neighbourhoods in periods of pandemic. This will be no different. Secondly the data is already showing that density is not a determinant of severity in this pandemic and all indicators point out that recovery will be swifter in Great Neighbourhoods. Vancouver-based urbanist Brent Toderian has written the to-date definitive piece on this specific COVID-19 question in his op-ed titled, “It’s Not the Density, It’s the Crowding.”
However, there is a crisis that faces Great Neighbourhoods that lies in its underpinning philosophical response to the big challenges that face our world. When Al Gore made climate change famous with “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Congress for the New Urbanism responded that thankfully there’s a convenient solution: urbanism (or Great Neighbourhoods). There have been countless books and dozens of movements within the broader sustainability movement that have been based on the idea that we should think globally but act locally. And while this will continue to be the case, COVID-19 is showing us that acting locally alone will not be sufficient when the next, more virulent pandemic comes at us - or when climate change unleashes too much instability at too rapid a rate. What should now be apparent is that we also need to act globally.
The danger with acting globally is that it can easily aid the rise of authoritarianism, which was already problematically ascendant before COVID-19 struck. I continue to aspire to a vision of Great Neighbourhoods based on personal empowerment and responsibility, strong communities, and a healthy democracy. But this localized vision now needs to occur in the context of greater global cooperation. To my thinking right now the two big systems that are required - at the national level for sure, but coordinated globally, are Universal Public Health Care Systems and the introduction of Universal Basic Income.
I’m 100% confident the data will show that public health care systems weathered COVID-19 much better than the free for all disaster the USA will suffer from. It will also hopefully put to rest the slide into privatization that Alberta was flirting with prior to all this. But only if we collectively insist that this is the path we must pursue. And while I’ve never been happier to be a Canadian than I am in this crisis, we’re living in a global world and we have an increasingly problematic neighbour. Our ability to coordinate globally will be increasingly challenged until and unless there’s a serious reset of our faltering global order.
A much more significant change for Canada will be the introduction of Universal Basic Income. Over the last couple years I’ve become increasingly concerned about the emerging consensus that in ~20 years, ~50% of the population will be permanently unemployable - replaced by automation and artificial intelligence. The only sensible solution to this is Universal Basic Income. My concern has involved how we possibly get there from here. What COVID-19 has given us is a preview of that world: white collar workers working in relative comfort from home or spacious offices; blue collar workers at construction sites, distribution centers and grocery stores and traveling by transit and trying to avoid crowding and stay healthy; and massive amounts of us unemployed and contending with the mental health challenges associated with a loss of stability and agency. Is now the opportunity to get there from where we were? I believe it is.
Read: Could the CERB program lead Canada toward offering a universal basic income?
Listen: The Finnish Experiment - 99% Invisible Podcast
COVID-19 is serious. But it’s not as terrible as it might have been and it’s a great test run for the challenges that lie ahead. We’re headed into a different world in slow motion. We have the time to think and discuss. I believe universal public health care and basic income systems are an essential part of our best future. What else? A recommitment to high quality public education? What else? A tear down and retooling of our democracy? What else? Finally getting serious about climate change? What else?