Sheltering Safely in Community Neighbourhoods

"Neighbourhoods at the core of the city [Manhattan] had a lower rate of infection."
"And through the first two weeks of April, that gap between the core and the periphery actually grew rather than shrank."
Salim Furth, senior research fellow, Mercator Center, Arlington, Va.

"The right way to do isolation is to do it quickly."
"We want to have the ability to isolate over short periods of time and use that short time to help people get over the disease and get back to normal."
Yaneer Bar-Yam, director, New England Complex Sciences Institute

New York is down, but certainly not out. PHOTO: Colton Duke

Logic had it -- or so it was thought -- that dense urban environments would ensure that the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 infection rate would skyrocket. In New York that didn't quite happen. The super-dense city wasn't super-infected in the densest areas, after all. A map of viral spread in New York in mid-April showed that the heat of infection was not in the subway-tentacled heart of the city; rather it took place in the roomy car-dependent outer neighbourhoods.

When coronavirus infection data was compared with commute models across zip codes, researcher Salim Furth realized that higher viral infection rates appeared to take place in car-dependent neighbourhoods. The reason behind this phenomenon is not yet understood, but a reasonable theory has arisen; that subway users, conscious of the need to self-isolate stayed behind in their own communities, while those residents living in suburban sprawl continued to drive.



Grocery stores, pharmacies and all manner of services are located some distance away in most suburban sprawl locations, as are big box stores and shopping plazas where hundreds or thousands of people gather and physically interact. Though epidemiologists are left to sift through piles of risk factors, viral spread is being increasingly linked to crowded conditions within dwellings as well as occupations placing workers in close proximity to many others.

These conditions are associated not with density per se, but poverty. Toronto released a map indicating viral rates at the end of May across the city, where poor neighbourhoods on the fringes were hit harder than the dense, affluent downtown core. Similarly globally, the densest cities -- Seoul and Singapore among them -- were recognized as being the most successful at countering the viral infection rate.

Vancouver's Commercial Drive, Edmonton's Strathcona, Toronto's Danforth are all areas where residents are able to readily walk to access daily needs; shopping, school, supermarkets, community centre, places of worship, parks.  These represent self-sufficient communities, where short local lockdowns can take place without inconveniencing residents to the straining point.



Public health officials have advised that cities adopt more walkable community designs, where those living in walkable communities with an abundance of local shops, services and amenities report being likelier to know and trust their neighbours; relationships where people look out for one another. Even children growing within mixed-use, walkable places benefit hugely, and end up more likely to climb the socio-economic ladder.

Because of the global pandemic and the influence it has exerted on people's daily lives an unprecedented opportunity has opened for a timely change in city structures. As a result of the crisis neighbourhood streets have seen changes with less traffic enabling people to have room to move and breathe. Business districts have been transforming parking lanes into patios for social distance dining and shopping. Homeless people have been offered hotel rooms during the crisis.

Will these lessons in civic and civil bonds between people continue, should city planners recognize the benefits inherent in community neighbourhoods? In a truly crowded city like Tokyo, community neighbourhoods are the norm; people belong, feel comfortable, are able to walk to all the services they hold dear and require for a comfortable lifestyle. Why not emulate what is successful?