Cities are an essential element in the history of humanity. First appearing approximately 10,000 years ago, they have survived an infinity of catastrophic events and managed to regroup and carry on developing. While the Covid pandemic is not the first event of its kind to affect that development, it does represent a turning point for urban areas by calling into question their role as the nerve centers of a global network. Indeed, the events of the past year have had a notable impact on daily practice and on the idea itself of globalization, obliging reconsideration of the key places in that process: global metropolises.
This does not mean we have come to the end of the city as we know it; rather what we are witnessing a kind of rebirth according to a new model. Urban centers are complex systems, so adequate governance requires that the changes underway be identified and indicators capable of explaining their future evolution be found.
The most important challenge at the moment seems to be to redefine the relationship between center and periphery, both within metropolitan areas and within entire nations. The pandemic has certainly had an impact on the very notion of urban organization. Distance working, along with the collapse of tourism, has emptied urban areas; at the same time, however, it has offered an opportunity to create widespread economic development in metropolises where citizens are seeking new and broader habitat solutions in outlying areas. Moreover, the pandemic seems to have helped revive small towns and areas once depressed, in addition to offering growth and the attraction of human capital to medium-sized cities that are able to offer a combination of a wide range of services and higher quality of life.
The demand for goods and services in new areas is surely a major factor in post-pandemic development, but a long-term strategy is called for. Indeed, infrastructure once again becomes central: both digital infrastructure – the importance of which has come sharply to the fore over recent months – and physical infrastructure. The latter facilitates communication for all those working outside urban centers who need to reach them with reasonable ease and speed.
Urban mutation then poses the problem of revamping connectivity systems – today concentrated for the most part in urban centers – which will have to be adjusted to a more widespread mobility. This change calls for adequate administrative instruments and a redefinition of investments, which must be keyed to the new demands. The pandemic has accelerated a trend, already triggered in some metropolises, toward the creation of a polycentric “15-minute” city, where the primary services are accessible on foot and located in each neighborhood.
Italy’s main challenge is to come up with a new development strategy using the Recovery Fund resources. European funds must be part of a strategic vision that involves all those private actors that have always been essential to urban evolution.
The country has changed its territorial model radically over the last two decades: if local protagonists were pivotal to the economic growth that followed the Second World War based on a polycentric model still in use in Germany, de-industrialization and the rise of advanced services have concentrated investments and opportunities – and therefore human capital – in Milan. Without depriving that metropolis of its prominence, the pandemic can offer a chance to abandon “French-style” monocentrism and encourage a return to a more homogeneous territorial development capable of generating prosperity for the nation as a whole.