The pandemic has shown what’s wrong with our urban environment

A month or so ago I took a walk through Wood Green. In any other week of the ten plus years that I have been living in London, this would be thoroughly unremarkable, however, in these strange days of Covid-19, it was the closest thing to “traveling” I have done since the pandemic began.

For the last 13 months, I have barely strayed further than the park around the corner from my house. Walking through a different part of London was something of a treat. I was instantly transported back to all the other times I have walked through Wood Green, going to or from The Green Rooms or The Toll Gate, visiting friends, or watching a film at Vue Wood Green (hands down the best place in London to watch any of the Fast and Furious movies).

This time, all of Wood Green’s many shops were closed. On what would have been a busy shopping afternoon any day of the last ten years, the high street was practically empty. I felt as if I were walking through occupied territory. Not territory occupied by an enemy who had set up checkpoints and pillboxes to suppress the locals, but a crawling infectious enemy that transforms the land it occupies into a twisted parody of itself. Something more like Command and Conquer’s Tiberium or the creeping weirdness unleashed in Annihilation.

The shattered ruins of our former lives

For me, staying home for the last 13 months has been a manageable challenge. I’m surprised at how quickly - given beer deliveries from local breweries and the endless volume of films on Netflix - I have adapted to not going out. I found a routine that has sustained me for the last year and a bit. It involves pretending that the outside world doesn’t exist and spending as much time on my sofa as possible. It also involves not thinking about all the theatres, cinemas and museums that I can’t visit.

Being outside and walking previously familiar streets reminded me of what we have all collectively lost. Outside is the shattered ruins of the lives we had before the pandemic. I walked through urban centres designed entirely around shopping, which isn’t possible during the lockdown. Everywhere I went I saw useless urban spaces, built for the glorification of the god of retail. A god that Covid-19 has killed.

The embourgeoisement of the inner city

These large shopping centres that now stand silent are part of a specifically designed urban environment. A lot of them were parts of elaborate regeneration schemes that were designed to boost the local economy. The idea that underpinned this was that shopping would move away from the soulless American style out of town shopping centres, with acres of car parks surrounding grey warehouse-sized shops, towards something more French: inner city spaces where we could live, shop and do leisure in the same few streets.

Writer on urbanism Jonathan Meades describes this as the “embourgeoisement of the inner city” in his book Museum Without Walls. Meades says that this embourgeoisement, when combined with the decline in social housing has resulted in a demographic change around our town centres.

Walking through Wood Green I can see the evidence of the embourgeoisement of the inner city, the fancy coffee shops and craft beer bars, but these are closed alongside the Wetherspoons and the Argos. Embourgeoisement of an urban space didn’t protect it from Covid-19.

From life to death

The embourgeoisement of the inner city was supposed to breathe life into these spaces. Instead, it was just another wave of the commercialisation of all public space. Embourgeoisement created shops, shops, shops, more shops and the occasional branch of Costa Coffee where you can take a break from your shopping. Before embourgeoisement, Wood Green had shops, shops, shops, more shops of a different kind and the occasional non-brand cafe where you can take a break from your shopping. This is now all pointless.

We would like our urban centres to look like the modern day equivalent of a painting by L. S. Lowry when viewed from a nearby hill. Small brightly coloured people move between home and industry, part of a larger community. Now they resemble a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, deserted and life-less, populated by huge structures that have a disturbing absence of purpose. This is architecture without industry. Urbanism without community.

We need a new way of thinking about our urban environment. Putting large shopping centres in the middle of former industrial areas and expecting everything to turn into the prettier parts of Paris or New York is hopelessly naive. In a world where shopping is online and a pandemic can close us off from most of our urban environment, we need to ask the question: is our surroundings contributing positively to our lives?

Accessible to all

A different vision of our urban environments would include more green spaces, more places to meet people that weren’t based around buying either goods or coffee, and more leisure spaces. It goes without saying that these spaces should be inclusive for disabled people, people of different income levels or social classes, and people of different racial or cultural backgrounds.

This mustn’t be some corporate vision of people shopping and living together in a “mixed use urban development” or a world inhabited by the indistinct, characterless people who appear on the awnings that cover new developments of luxury flats. These need to be places that real people, all real people, can use. Even in a pandemic.

An opportunity for change

The pandemic is an opportunity to change and looking at our urban spaces dominated by rows of closed shops the case for change is obvious. Even if we can go back to the way things were - Saturdays given over to shopping and the occasional quick refreshment break - our urban environments are still not suitable for us.

They are too dominated by private commercial spaces that you need to spend money in to be allowed to use. They should be accessible for public transport and contribute towards the solution to the environmental challenges we all face.

We won’t be able to change our urban spaces as quickly as we were able to close them down, but we can start thinking about the different urban environment we want post-pandemic. Then when we know what it is we want, we can make it real.

"Empty Shopping Centre" by delcond is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0