The Fyre Festival of Urbanism
This is Shutdown Corners, a newsletter about how coronavirus is reshaping urbanism
If your article focuses on magnificent flying machines, it goes to reason that you’d be served with plenty of dunks. The New York Times ran an article Saturday about eVTOL (Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing, not a Billy Corgan solo album), looking at the pace of development in the so-called urban air mobility world. Not surprisingly, the idea of personal short-range flying cars to bypass traffic hits a chord in our age of inequality, climate crisis, and underfunded urban transportation, and the article garnered plenty of responses.
I found the piece a relatively sober look at a speculative, somewhat fanciful future: an examination of firms racing to develop a very expensive, unproven business model, and their plans, spurred on by billionaire investors such as Larry Page, with nods towards the issues with regulation and taking off for more than a test flight. The notion that someone is going to jump in a single-person autonomous vehicle and let a robot fly them over a city; let’s just say I get severe anxiety with actual pilots in a turbulence-free passenger jet.
The part that stuck with me the most was a description of the startup Opener, which “is building a single-person aircraft for use in rural areas—essentially a private flying car for the rich.” Now, the idea of dealing with regulatory approvals, safety issues, infrastructure, and noise problems, not to mention using so many resources, all so it’s easier for a C-Suite member to commute in from their second home in a Zoom Town, seems especially over-the-top.
It also made me think about one of the fundamental fault lines and fights in urbanism today, how do we get people close to opportunity and affordable housing. The idea of flying cars brings up a number of common sci-fi and social references, from The Jetsons to Blade Runner. I kept thinking about elites in Latin America, who, in many past trend stories, charter helicopters to avoid the crime and traffic of sprawling megacities.
Any rich executive in the U.S. using one of these electric flying vehicles would, for the most part, be able to afford to live near the opportunity to which they are commuting. It’s especially vexing to look at this technology through the lens of opportunity and urbanism in the United States, as it’s clear that policy decisions, especially the way we (often don’t) build homes, and economic stratification push so many workers to live further and further from their jobs. Having a CEO buzz above you like George Jetson while gritting your teeth during another hour-plus commute says a lot about the forces of concentration and gatekeeping in U.S. cities (the number of supercommtuers, those who spend at least 90 minutes each way to work, rose 32% between 2005 and 2017).
A handful of articles this week, especially Ezra Klein’s What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor, Jonathan Mahler’s New York Is Back. Now It Has a Second Chance and George Packer’s The Four Americas, have made me think a lot about inequality, meritocracy, and elites in the U.S (especially the Packer piece, though I have lots of questions and disagreements with some of his characterizations). The flying taxi/personal electric hover car concept jumps out as such a perfect example of this, and how it mirrors problems in our cities. Let’s rely on expensive technology (cough, autonomous cars) and invest in solutions tailored to the affluent instead of investing in transit infrastructure that makes everyone’s trip better. Let’s push back on zoning reform because I love my million-dollar home in a desirable neighborhood, instead of allowing more apartments and sharing the wealth of opportunity. The following passage from Mahler’s piece about how NYC bounces back really captures the “what comes after corona” moment we’re in.
What became clear, no matter whom I was talking to or what we were talking about, was that we were really talking about one of two things: real estate or schools. In a city as dense and yet divided as New York, everything flows from where you live and where you, or your children, go to school. More than anything, these factors define your quality of life and your prospects for improving it.
In a country where many are having a conniption fit about rising wages and a worker shortage, it seems like improving transportation for said group of workers, some of whom were once labeled essential, would be a great way to help more of them get to work.
To circle back to transportation technology, it makes me all the more concerned that there seems to be more people buying into the Boring Co.’s traffic tunnels, despite a rinse-and-repeat media cycle of hyped proposals that disappear before breaking ground. Per this NBC piece, officials in Fort Lauderdale traveled to Las Vegas to see the Boring Co.’s work. Like many Boring Co. projects, the Vegas tunnel has downgraded its design and vision over time, and drawn the skepticism of many engineering experts. But while its power to mitigate transportation issues is doubtful, its power to draw attention from politicians and investments in proposals is as strong as ever.
Clickbaity newsletter headline aside, I don’t think everyone involved in these new technologies is trying to sell the urbanism equivalent of bread and cheese in a styrofoam container. But I do think the solutions we need aren’t necessarily about clever and smart and flashy as they’re about fairness and equity.
Cities, flush with recovery funds and potentially beneficiaries of a large infrastructure bill, may have a real chance to invest in infrastructure. The question of whether that money will go towards, say, electric buses and better bike infrastructure (equitable, economically feasible, quick to implement with enough political backbone) or, frankly, flying cars and car tunnels, is crucially important.
If the central question of post-corona urbanism is equity, and how we take a crisis and challenge and truly build back better, it’s time to really ask what essential is.
Reading List
The American Mall: How Shopping Shaped Postwar America: I’d recommend just about anything Alexandra Lange writes, such as this CityLab story on urbanism for teenage girls, but I’m especially excited about her forthcoming book about malls. Here’s a link to one of her first talks about the topic.
It’s Hard Work to Make Ordering Groceries Online So Easy: “The guinea pig for this is warehouse workers.” I’m forever obsessed with automated grocery stores and next-generation retail, mostly because I believe the collision of labor rights, retail real estate, and employer surveillance has so many implications for the future.
Senate passes $250 billion bipartisan tech and manufacturing bill aimed at countering China: Reshoring/onshoring, anybody? As Mark Muro at Brookings noted, the big competitiveness/response to China bill contains a provision to invest in regional tech hubs. Very interested to see how this push, along with growth in electric vehicle plants and a push to build biomanufacturing, can be harnessed to help develop more regional economies.
Thanks for checking out Shutdown Corners, a newsletter written by me, Patrick Sisson, a freelance writer in Los Angeles covering the trends, tech, and policy shaping our cities. Please consider referring to a friend, and if you were sent this, please subscribe yourself. Send any tips, feedback, suggestions, or questions to patsisson@gmail.com.