COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly changed people’s life & master planning for cities
Moving into January of 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has been around us for about a year. The novel pandemic has undoubtedly changed the way we life, work, play around a city, affecting every single social activity such as seats sharing, trains commuting, and dining pattern of the people.
The radical change in social activities has prompted a new round of thinking about how the pandemic will redefine urban living as well as master planning of cities. The perceptions and priorities of urban dwellers could change profoundly and permanently, having experienced the worst hit of the wide-spread pandemic and unable to socially distance effectively.
Urban planners and master planners are now challenged to re-think how they should do things differently to create cities and developments that are more resilient to the cascading economic effect from a pandemic crisis.
What are the different views around the world?
… on population density
It is clear that the spreading of communicable diseases has high correlation with population density, but many organisations held different views against how we should approach this.
International health organisation – World Health Organization (WHO) hold the view that urban living can make residents vulnerable to communicable diseases such as tuberculosis from crowding and poor ventilation, and waterborne and vector-borne diseases such as dengue.
But on the other hand, the U.N. agency for housing and urban development – UN-Habitat, says more compact cities can also help stave off contagion because residents have easier access to healthcare facilities.
Density management will be a key area for long-term survival in a pandemic world. Kuala Lumpur, as the densest city in Malaysia has 17,310 people per square mile, but city like Mumbai has 76,790 people per square mile, more than four times of Kuala Lumpur’s density. One can clearly see that, the crowd control and social distancing in such cities around the world would face various difficulties in implementation. Capacities of public utilities and infrastructure would also be a major issue even at normal time.
… on infrastructure planning
Countries around the world have undertaken various type of movement control measures and social distancing efforts to cut the transmission chain in hope of preventing the wide spread of pandemic. However, it seems almost impossible to execute these efforts evenly across all parts of a city.
“We manage the risk of rich parts of the city well, but we have left other parts of the city to fend for themselves,” says Richard Matthew, who studies urban planning, environmental change, and poverty at UC Irvine.
“If we want to prevent these things, we have to do a better job of managing the extremely rapid changes going on where agriculture and urbanisation are happening in the same space,” says James Spencer, City Planner at Clemson University who has been investigating avian influenza.
The proper technical term here is “peri-urban”, which means the places on the cusp of integrating with a developed city while still keeping a foot in the agricultural world. Often time, these peri-urban areas are the origin points for wide-spread pandemic, due to improper infrastructure planning to manage the hygiene of tens of thousands to millions of individual livestock animals.
Sanitary control, waste management, and crowd control at certain parts of a city seem to be less emphasised due to location and readiness of infrastructure. But this is understandable as it does not make financial sense for high infrastructure investments that are impossible to be recovered.
Pandemic Crisis VS Investible Master Planning
Master planning for cities and property development has always been a reflection of prevailing technological and cultural trends, as well as major crises and economic trends. Some sample from history:
- The cholera epidemics in London in the 19th century sparked the introduction of sanitary reform movement which led to the modern urban sanitation systems.
- Housing regulations around light and air were introduced as a measure against respiratory diseases in overcrowded slums in Europe during industrialisation.
- The introduction of railroads had an immense impact on national urban systems, and the mass production of the car has led to cities that bleed seamlessly into sprawling suburbs, creating vast city regions.
- In recent years, digitalisation and the emergence of big data have changed the way we commute within cities.
The COVID-19 pandemic signifies the beginning of yet another round of transformation in master planning for cities and property developments.
- People and traffic movement dropped to an unprecedentedly low level during the movement control orders
- Work from home (WFH) is the new normal where billions of business and worker rely on online digital platforms to make a living
- Social distancing and sanitary precautious in public areas are made compulsory, not only from policy angle, but also slowly stemming out from the self-awareness of people
- Capacities of hospitals and healthcare facilities are insufficient to cater for the spiking demand of bed in an area during the peak period of the crisis
These changes have brought up the debates about how cities should be designed to better respond to current and future crises. These increasing requirement on cities and property developments has made the concept of Investible Master Planning growingly important. (Investible – often refers to an asset in which an investment can be made.)
Investible Master Plan (IMP) – a term coined in early 2010s by Mr. Girish Ramachandran, a seasoned master planner, defined it as a dynamic planning document that provides a development framework taking into consideration the people, planet, profit (3Ps), and strive to adopt the most appropriate public-private-partnership model that will maximise the benefits of Private Developers and Authorities, while delivering a development that will bring sustainable values to the inhabitants.
With the COVID-19 significantly altered urban life, master planner is now challenged to re-think the fundamental relationship between every component in a property development, adopting the Investible Master Plan framework for more innovative planning that will deliver a people-centric development which is more than just a collection of concrete building and infrastructure, but also contribute to the welfare of public health and best interest of developers.
What are the upcoming trends that are likely to happen …?
Driven by the concept of IMP at its core, we have gathered a list of emerging trends around the world that would give a taste of how the master planning for cities and property developments will transform in the near future:
Trend 1: More localised infrastructure & design to promote local lifestyle (15-min city concept)
On 25th March 2020, Barcelona mayor Ada Colau announced a 4.4-million-euro (USD 4.8 million) plan to make the city more suitable for walkers and cyclists under social distancing rules. It includes the widening of road pavements, creation of an additional 21 km of cycle lanes and 12 km of pedestrian walkways.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo also said she is aiming for a “15-minute city,” where most people’s daily needs are a short walk, cycle ride or public transport commute away. Several other city leaders are also working on initiatives that targets to bring the urban communities closer.
This concept can effectively revive the suburb areas, by creating more reasons for the smaller communities to live, work and play around a more concentrated zone. Converting the long commutes and car drives to walking or bikes would also significantly reduce the carbon emission, increase public health, reduce traffic congestion and free up parking spaces for other usages.
The core of this concept is a creative and community-centric design, where the fundamental infrastructure and cities components such as school, food access, and housing access are being designed such that the residents can walk and cycling safer, while promoting social distancing and reduce the needs for long-distance travel to slow down the spread of infection.
Trend 2: Greater focus on the access to core public services with higher capacities
The sudden spike of pandemic patients during the peak period of the crisis had raised people awareness on the importance of public healthcare facilities and its capacities. Thousands of infected patients failed to receive proper medical treatments at their darkest days. Other essential services, potable water, and sanitised transit system seems inaccessible especially during the crucial period.
Master planner and health planner will need to revisit the guidelines for population to bed ratio, capacity of healthcare infrastructures, as well as key public facilities to ensure there is sufficient capacities or proper mechanism to handle sudden surge of demand in such services.
Trend 3: Upgrading utilities & digital infrastructure to cater for the New Norm
Following the movement control orders which limits the physical interaction of people, statistics show that the people have been spending more of their live online. Internet usage for social media, workplace, learning, shopping, and entertainment have drastically increase since the beginning of these social distancing measures. This rising demand for internet and faster internet speed indicates a growing need to increase the capacity of internet infrastructure.
A key part of the social distancing measures is the monitoring and control of compliance. Enforcement unit such as police department and security guard might not be enough to ensure the compliance of social distancing policies, especially when business owners are being forced to resume operation discretely under the financial pressure, despite knowing the risk of pandemic. Digital infrastructures that enable features such as public surveillance, crowd detection & monitoring, mask detection, area occupancy count, and queue management became very handy in this situation.
Thus, a complete digital backbone with data center and control room is deemed reasonable and viable, to form a comprehensive digital infrastructure network that will offer greater value proposition to a city or property development.
Trend 4: More supplies of affordable housing around job centers
Typically, the value of a real estate is largely dependent on its location and surrounding environment, including the neighbouring facilities such as shopping mall, transit center, education facilities, hospital or medical center, as well as the distance from city center. This normally implies that the place which generated most of the jobs are also the place which has higher house price. The increasing house price in city center created a dilemma where the lower income earners (Bottom 40 / B40) will need to stay suburb and move away from the place they work since they cannot afford to stay at the houses nearby.
Affordable housing programme could be a life saver to the B40. However, it might not be a good investment in a typical case as the developer will make lesser earnings and the affordable housing project will also affect the branding of neighbouring high-end real estate projects. Nonetheless, the city center or more developed areas are not the exclusive for the rich and that a suitable set of zoning strategies could be adopted to help preserve the premium value of city center at the same time offering the affordable housing with better geographical advantages.
Trend 5: Decentralising public services
The wide-spread of a communicable disease such as COVID-19 has raised the awareness of people towards the importance of public services such as waste collection and healthcare. The related urban systems have high risks for cross-contamination.
The SARS epidemic is a good example, where Hong Kong introduced regulation to improve the collection and management of wastewater after discovering that SARS was transmitted through connected drainage systems.
As a measure for early identification of COVID patient, many countries such as Italy are considering to conduct door-to-door testing. However, this is no practical in larger cities such as Melbourne (5 million residents) or Shanghai with more than 10 million urban dwellers.
Decentralisation and privatisation of public essential services such as waste collection and healthcare would be able to significantly improve the operational efficiencies, by enabling multiple operating units to perform their duties concurrently, without overstressing the management and capacity of a single organisation.
Trend 6: Enhance the re-usability of buildings & infrastructure
Designing buildings that are re-usable or convertible to other multiple functions could be a longer-term solution to address the shortage of capacities in certain facilities. Buildings such as convention centers, hotels, public facilities, schools, and community center can be designed in such a way that it is convertible to temporary medical facilities and shelters for homeless when necessary.
The roads circulation designs, including the interchange, ingress and egress can be better designed such that, the common spaces can be temporary converted to other uses, and the circulation or roads can be controlled to limit the movement of cars and people within a particular area, with minimal manpower.
Trend 7: Flexible home design which enable multiple functions
Working from home has slowly becoming a norm and many predicted that a portion of the workforce will remain working from home even after the pandemic. This prompt for more innovative design of the domestic home spaces as people spend more time at their home.
Australian design firm Woods Bagot launched its Split Shift Home design aimed at helping parents who both work from home while sharing parental responsibilities. The unit has features like moveable walls, an area for growing fruits and vegetables, and extra office and food storage spaces.
Trend 8: Availability of crowd-free public park
With the on-going social distancing policy, people are prohibited from long distance travel as well as close contact with each other. This has heightened the people’s desire to escape from their house (jail) and wander around the accessible areas when they are not at home, probably a public park if there is one. Now, a public park that is designed around social distancing principle and enable the people to walk around without worrying about the risk to be affected will be very handy.
Studio Precht, an architecture studio based in Austria has designed a new maze-like crowd-free public park. Their Parc de la Distance was conceived as a proposal for a vacant lot in Vienna but could be replicated on any unused patch of urban land, of any size, the architects said. The paths in the park are 2.4 metres apart, with 90-cm hedges dividing them, allowing visitors to experience the benefits of green space while remaining at a safe physical distance.
Trend 9: Availability of parking sites
“People may decide that driving is safer than taking public transit, and there will be more pressure to cede that space to cars again – which would be to our detriment” said Sara Jensen Carr, assistant architecture professor at Boston’s Northeastern University.
The fear of taking public transit would make the people to change their travel habit to driving, which leads to higher demand in parking sites. However, the availability of parking site has always been an issue for a country like Malaysia, especially for the older development areas where the infrastructure planning is obsolete. Moving forward, all new cities or property development will need to explore ways to increase the parking sites and perhaps digitise it through sensors and mobile apps for better monitoring, control and monetisation.
Conclusions …
In short, the master planning for cities and property development is an evolving process where the master planner will need to constantly observe the emerging trends, progress of pandemic and the needs of citizens, in order to craft a planning document that is functional and investible. This would ensure the project will be able to deliver sustainable values to the citizens and bring considerable returns to the developers.
As part of the process, the investible master plan will place more emphasis on the socio-economic engineering, where development framework is guided by the forecasted socio-economic benefits. Sensitivity test and on-going socio-economic assessment will be carried out to compare and realign various alternatives in order to arrive at an optimal combination that will bring greatest stakeholder value.
References:
The City Fix – Will Covid-19 affect urban planning
The New York Times – The Virus Changed the Way We Internet
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/07/technology/coronavirus-internet-use.html
World Economic Forum – Coronavirus Change Cities Infrastructure
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/coronavirus-change-cities-infrastructure
Bloomberg – How the Coronavirus could change city planning
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-06/how-the-coronavirus-could-change-city-planning
USA Today – The 50 most densely populated cities in the world
Wired – Coronavirus (COVID-19) Urban Planning Health
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-covid-19-urban-planning-health/
World Population Review – Kuala Lumpur Population
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/kuala-lumpur-population
WSP –Rethinking urban planning in a post-covid world
https://www.wsp.com/en-MY/insights/rethinking-urban-planning-in-a-post-covid-world
(Photo by Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images)
