The statist elite has long dreamed of a future of high-density urban living and working, built around mass transit systems. That dream has become a casualty of Covid-19.
The dream of a future in which a majority of people would live and work in well-planned, high-density, efficient urban spaces, connected by mass transit, was born in the wealthier enclaves of Europe, and enthusiastically adopted by the leftie elites in coastal US cities such as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Boston. It has guided spatial development in many places around the world ever since.
South Africa’s own National Development Plan (NDP) refers back to the Reconstruction and Development Programme’s original aim of ‘breaking down apartheid geography through land reform, more compact cities, decent public transport and the development of industries and services that use local resources and/or meet local needs’.
A mass transit service such as the Gautrain light rail system was intended to create high-density multi-use developmental nodes around its stations, with the hope that many people would live and work within walking distance of such a train station.
‘New urban development and infrastructure investments should be focused around corridors of mass transit and around existing and emergent economic nodes,’ the NDP says, ‘applying internationally accepted principles of transit-oriented development.’
A major driver for this compact urban living ideal is the notion that it is environmentally friendly. High-density developments take up less surface area, and mass transit uses less energy than sprawling suburbs connected only by roads used by single-occupant cars.
The NDP says: ‘Urban sprawl should be contained and, possibly, reversed as denser forms of development are more efficient in terms of land usage, infrastructure cost and environmental protection’.
The plan, then, is to ‘create the conditions for more humane – and environmentally sustainable – living and working environments’.
All this would be achieved by requiring municipalities to adopt a strategy for spatial restructuring, direct land-use management towards the goal of high-density mixed-use urban environments, develop public transport systems that support this goal, and incentivise private developments that align with the government’s spatial development aims.
Green futurism
Whenever I think of ideas such as this, the images in my head are all artist’s impressions of futuristic green urban living. They’re not real.
They’re probably not much different from President Cyril Ramaphosa’s visions of ‘smart cities’, which he extols every now and again when he has to distract us from yet another disastrous state of the nation.
Something like the Blatchford ‘agrihood’, under development in Edmonton, Canada:
Look at all the happy rich people growing their own food in communal gardens! They walk everywhere, and cycle a lot, because everything you could ever want is right there in your own neighbourhood, and all of it is designed especially for fit, healthy, able-bodied people.
In South Africa, of course, our central planners (in the form of the National Planning Commission), would insist the developments are mixed-income, with the poor, the middle-class and the rich living all together and sharing the same amenities.
How communal gardens would work in such an environment is anyone’s guess, and they’re nowhere in sight in this artist’s impression of Conradie Park, a high-density mixed-income mixed-use development in Cape Town with all the ambience of a prison:
Then there’s this one, designed for Boston:
Nobody will have a car, but everyone will have a sailboat! This reminds me a little of Thesen Island, in Knysna. It is decidedly not mixed-income, and is, frankly, hostile to outsiders, especially poor outsiders.
And how about this smart city, designed for Ningbo, China:
There’s a reason China is so appealing for large-scale smart green city developments, and it has nothing to do with what its people want. It has everything to do with the central planning mentality of the Chinese Communist Party.
They’re the 21st century version of brutalist architecture: places to squash large numbers of people together in small, faceless, efficient, modern apartments. This example is from communist-era Poland:
These utopian urban designs are the wet dreams of city planners and architects. They enchant the wealthy, eco-conscious urban elite. They are the flagships – the movie trailers – of the ideology of ‘sustainable development’, which lies at the heart of technocratic, socialistic central-planning initiatives from Agenda 21 to the Great Reset.
Died of Covid
The Covid-19 pandemic may well be the death-knell of all this centrally planned bliss.
Around the world, the idea of crowding together on urban mass transit, living on top of each other in compact designer condominiums, and working together in crowded, air-conditioned offices, has lost its appeal.
As normality begins to return in some jurisdictions where governments bothered to order vaccines on time, people aren’t willing to return to their jobs.
Companies in the service and hospitality industries are having to offer stellar wages to tempt people back into customer-facing positions. Corporations are having to make peace with the fact that many office workers, having tasted the pleasure and convenience of working from home, are simply not prepared to come back to the office.
Mass transit and high-density urban townships are among the reasons why South Africa’s early, aggressive, lengthy and economically catastrophic lockdown was unable to slow down the spread of coronavirus, and, likely accelerated the spread of the disease. Density kills.
Not many people want a neatly planned, dense, mixed-use, mixed-income urban environment for living and working. They’ll accept it, if they’re poor. It is better than living in shantytowns.
But if they can avoid physical workplaces, they will. If they can live outside high-density urban developments, they will. And without the rich, financing these urban developments will become that much harder.
I expect small towns to get an influx of new residents who have discovered that video-conferencing is an adequate substitute for face-to-face meetings at the office, and who resent wasting hours per day in traffic or on public transit.
Unfortunately, not everyone will have this luxury, but many will rethink their priorities given the knowledge that deadly pandemics are spread more easily in dense urban environments with mass transit within and between cities.
Covid has killed the vision of eco-friendly, high-density urban living and working spaces, strictly planned by technocratic communists. Welcome to a new era of distanced working and living in low-density environments, planned by nobody but the people themselves. Living large, one might call it.
[Image: Ysh1005, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49920635]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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