suburban sprawl: is it a covid-19 super-spreader?

when the coronavirus hammered new york this spring, it seemed obvious to everyone that the city was super-dangerous because it’s super-dense. observers blamed the city’s subways and manhattan’s forest of apartment towers. even governor andrew cuomo , cited “all that density” for the city’s virus woes. wealthy residents fled to country houses. pundits declared the age of vertical cities over.

“neighbourhoods at the core of the city had a lower rate of infection,” says salim furth, a senior research fellow at the mercator center in arlington, va. “and through the first two weeks of april, that gap between the core and the periphery actually grew rather than shrank.”

when furth compared coronavirus infection data with commute modes (the way people travel to work) across zip codes, he stumbled on another surprise: the more a neighbourhood depended on cars, the higher its viral infection rate.

sparse vehicle and pedestrian traffic on yonge street in toronto during the covid-19 pandemic, thursday march 26, 2020. peter thompson / national post

epidemiologists are still sifting through a mountain of risk factors. but viral spread is increasingly being linked to crowding inside dwellings, and occupations that put workers in close contact with many other people — conditions more associated with poverty than density. when toronto finally released a  map showing viral rates across the city at the end of may, poor neighbourhoods on the fringes were much harder hit than the dense and affluent downtown core. around the world, the densest cities— places like seoul and singapore— have been among the most successful at countering the virus.

before covid-19, ebola was arguably the most fear-inducing pandemic in recent memory. when the virus ripped through western africa in 2014, governments attempted widespread contact tracing. but in cities it was hard to track down sick people’s contacts before the newly infected went on to infect yet more people. there were more than 11,000 deaths before ebola was suppressed in 2015.

that led data scientists to search for a better way to contain pandemics. using computer simulations of viral spread , a team at the new england complex science institute found that ebola could be stopped if authorities monitored infection on a community level, then limited travel from infected areas: if people with the virus were kept from travelling between neighbourhoods, outbreaks would be shorter and enable health authorities to focus their efforts.

commuters wearing protective masks ride the l subway line during rush hour in the williamsburg neighbourhood in the brooklyn borough of new york, u.s., on monday, june 8, 2020. nina westervelt/bloomberg

as i describe in my book, happy city , people in car-dependent communities die three to five years sooner than those who live in walkable, connected neighbourhoods. research in metro vancouver has shown that health care costs associated with heart disease are  50 per cent higher  for people living in car-dependent places. poor families also have less money for basics like healthy food when they are forced to drive everywhere.

all of this is why  public health officials  have been begging cities to adopt more walkable community designs. but pandemic preparedness, community design and public health do intersect: people who live in walkable communities with plentiful local shops, services and amenities also report being more likely to know and trust their neighbours — relationships that may actually keep them alive in times of crisis.

consider the japanese tsunami in 2011: when a six story-high wave smashed into the country’s northeastern coast, local relationships were a matter of life and death. in  closely connected communities , residents sought out the elderly and the vulnerable and carried them to safety before the wave hit, sometimes on their backs. high-trust areas had a much higher survival rate than disconnected places. then, in the months following the disaster, their residents were the quickest to return and the most successful at restarting their local economies.

restaurants on long island were permitted to open for outside service today as the region entered phase ii of new york state’s plan to return to normalcy after closings were mandated due to the coronavirus pandemic. bruce bennett/getty images

poor children who grow up in mixed-use, walkable places are more likely to  climb up the socio-economic ladder  too. it’s partly because they can reach opportunities without a car. but it’s also because people in walkable places tend to feel a deeper sense of belonging, an invisible but powerful emotional tonic which actually  predicts changes in social class  over time.

the pandemic has thrown all of us into a season of shock. but it has also created an unprecedented opportunity for change. in response to the crisis, neighbourhood streets have been slowed down to give people room to move and breathe. parking lanes in  business districts  are being converted into patios for social distance dining and shopping. homeless people have been offered rooms in hotels.

we need to ensure that black, indigenous and other marginalized canadians are helping direct changes in their own neighbourhoods, since they have been hurt the most by unhealthy design.