Vishaan Chakrabarti, FAIA, is the founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, as well as the author of the book A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America (Metropolis Books, 2013). After 9/11, he was appointed planning director for the city of Manhattan. He’s a former faculty member at Columbia University and the University of Virginia, and most recently, the William W. Wurster Dean at the University of California, Berkeley. We talked to him about the post-pandemic city and the opportunities of this moment.
Coming out of this pandemic, we have learned many lessons that we should build upon. There remains a huge digital divide for low-income communities, and we can think about how to bridge that divide, providing Wi-Fi, cell service, and broadband to every home.
Part of social mobility is actual mobility and how we transport people around. We are going through an enormous reshuffling in terms of how people work, and I don’t think the dust has settled around that in terms of how much people will be working from home versus commuting. A common conclusion we’ve heard during this period is that the pandemic has been an “accelerant” for certain trends that were already in the making. One of these trends is the transformation of where work happens— so, the city becoming truly multi-modal instead of just containing a couple of business districts. The pandemic is adding fuel to that transition because people are working from home, they’re working in cafes, they’re working in co-working spaces. What is the transportation system you need to support that? It’s not the hub-and-spoke system that we have in a city like New York. The entire system was built to bring people in and out of the central business districts in Manhattan. To me, the obvious answer is to rethink how we use our streets; to have far less private car usage in our cities; have far more bus routes; far more bike lanes; and far better accessibility for systems that allow people with disabilities to move around in cities. We need to stop allowing private cars to dominate and dictate so much of city space.
In my book, I talk about an “infrastructure of opportunity.” Equity is really about equal opportunity; it’s about cities providing a level playing field for everyone in terms of schooling, housing, infrastructure, health care, and public space. We need a new narrative of generosity, not of austerity. The point that Heather McGhee makes in her book The Sum of Us is that without this, we all lose, because we’re losing the extraordinary human capital that comes from giving everyone a fair shot.
This idea that we need a narrative of generosity isn’t just some airy notion of throwing money away, which I think is the way conservatives frequently paint this. It’s about equal investment in humanity, and it’s going to produce great results. With a spirit of generosity, we can build a better society.
