As the world is boarded up amid the worst stages of the pandemic, you may be forgiven for thinking it was a tone-deaf time to release Pretend It’s A City. Martin Scorsese’s Netflix series follows writer Fran Lebowitz around New York as she muses on the cultural history and social life of one of the world’s great metropolises.
It was filmed in a pre-pandemic New York. And along with that come all the accoutrements of urban life we have been sorely lacking the past year: packed subways, thronged streets, tourists milling in the worst places the city has to offer, restaurants and bars filled with people unaware of the looming practices of lockdowns and social distancing.
And it is a remarkable feat, not only buoyed by Lebowitz’s uniquely grouchy (but warm) feelings for her fellow man. But because it is a perfectly wrought reminder of what makes cities so valuable. She speaks from a dark and unventilated bar. She talks about the theatre and busy sidewalks, and parties too.
Without cities our lives would look remarkably different, and in all likelihood not for the better. And though Covid-19 may be a once in a lifetime occurrence, pandemics have come and gone before us
But cities are dead, haven’t you heard? The population of London could fall by 300,000 this year, according to PwC. And a recent poll found 40 per cent of city-dwelling Americans are considering a move to less populated areas. Youngsters have fled Dublin in favour of family homes across the island. Even before the pandemic people were leaving cities, driven out by high rents. Covid-19 has simply catalysed the inevitable: now we know we can work from home, why live in a city in the first place?
Professional pessimists
All of this is accompanied by the gleeful assertions of professional pessimists that there will never be a return to normal. Instead, the new normal will be remote working, offices drastically reduced in scale, social distancing in perpetuity, the vibrancy and allure of the urban landscape all but decimated in favour of a more parochial life. The need for proximity that saw the birth of cities will be the architect of their demise: proximity is dangerous, and undesirable, even in a post-pandemic world.
This may well be true if you believe cities have no value beyond reducing commute times. That the only reason someone would choose to live in such expensive, unclean and often dangerous places is because their jobs demand that of them.
Unfortunately this thinking is not simply staid and puritanical, but flimsy. It fails to acknowledge the litany of pull factors for cities that far exceed the office. Because as we navigate the absence of city life, we are reminded of its worth: cafes and restaurants and nightlife. Financial centres that generate economic growth. Cultural exchange that can only thrive in proximity. The vibrancy lent by thousands of cultures operating in close quarters.
And beyond that, accepting the decline of the city ignores the fact that they have long been indispensable for designing the world we live in, rural or urban. The very practice of epidemiology, as Farhad Manjoo points out in the New York Times, “was born in the city”, when a London scientist “tracked the spread of cholera to a contaminated water pump in 1854”.
Without cities our lives would look remarkably different, and in all likelihood not for the better. And though Covid-19 may be a once in a lifetime occurrence, pandemics have come and gone before us.
As Manjoo adds: “If cities were going to be crushed by pestilence, they would have died millenniums ago.” So too have people long fled cities in myriad circumstances. Wealthy New Yorkers do it every weekend in the summer. Patrician Romans left for their countryside villas to avoid the sweltering heat of July and August. The plague saw an exodus from London. But New York and Rome and London still survive.
Rising house prices
The pandemic will, of course, bring a recalibration in how cities operate. Rising house prices and hostile rental markets are forcing people out. We shouldn’t pretend it’s not a problem, and we ought not to underestimate the seismic political shifts it can engender. But it is not intractable either.
And as Lebowitz puts it: “No one can afford to live in New York, yet eight million people do.” Even in adverse circumstances, cities remain places people want to live.
It is in cities that we see the best of us: innovation, tolerance, multiculturalism, art and culture. The accomplishments of American Realism lay in depicting the true nature of urban life. Virginia Woolf may have written about the coast but she belonged to the Bloomsbury set; Enlightenment ideas may have changed the whole western world, but they were formed in coffee houses across European metropolises. Joyce’s fictional universe is a very real Dublin. The advent of remote working may alter the landscape, but it cannot undo any of this.
When asked why she was still in New York, after all these years, Lebowitz replied: “If there was another place I could think of I would have gone there.”
Perhaps urban life is due a reappraisal. But far from undermining the point of the city, the pandemic has reaffirmed its value. Reports of its death seem greatly exaggerated.