Stronger Systems: The Resilient Path to COVID-19 Recovery

This post is part of our comprehensive look at how COVID-19 is reshaping the mobility landscape.  For more original research, project work, and thought leadership from the Sam Schwartz team, visit the COVID-19 Response + Analysis center.

By Michael Flynn, AICP, LEED AP, Director of City Strategies; Zeke Mermell, AICP, LEED AP, Senior Urban Planner; and David Kaner, Communications Coordinator

This pandemic is not just about a virus.

The impacts of COVID-19 are not being caused by disease alone. They are profoundly structured by society-wide inequities: systemic racism, economic inequality, lack of access to healthcare, inadequate provision of housing, disinvestment in the public sector, environmental injustice, and spatial inequalities in our cities and towns. In thinking about long-term responses to COVID-19, it is essential to focus on how these intersecting systems affect health, wellbeing, and human security. Their glaring failures are no less of a crisis than the pandemic itself, and are inseparable from it.

We also cannot afford to concentrate exclusively on pandemic preparedness at the expense of other natural disasters. Earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, and floods will continue to pose grave dangers. Climate change is no less of an existential threat now than it was last year, and will increasingly act as an accelerant to risks of all kinds. Just as pandemic disease was not a high priority for many policymakers until recently, we can anticipate that some future disasters will be to a certain extent under-anticipated.

Given the interlocking nature of systemic challenges, the breadth of the risks facing humanity, and the fundamental unknowability of the future, a resilience approach is indispensable in this moment.

Benefits to a Resilience Approach

The World Bank has defined resilience as “the ability of a system, entity, community, or person to adapt to a variety of changing conditions and to withstand shocks while still maintaining its essential functions.”¹ The concept sees the world through systems; at every level, from the individual to the planet, outcomes are structured by their complex interactions. Building resilience, then, is about making systems both stronger and more flexible. Critically, doing so doesn’t just make communities and institutions better prepared for known risks; it also builds their capacity to confront unexpected shocks.

We’ve seen several benefits to the resilience approach in Sam Schwartz’s work that feel particularly apt for responding to this crisis.

Facilitating recovery

Strengthening relationships between different systemic actors yields more robust recoveries. Our Climate Resilience Plan for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey enhanced and connected disparate procedures including risk assessment, project planning, operations, and asset management. This bolstered the agency’s capacity to withstand and adapt to shocks both known and novel, ensuring key facilities can get back in operation faster.

Ensuring long-term strength across multiple dimensions

Breaking down silos between issues—as we’re aiming to do as part of Lower Manhattan’s resilience master plan—widens the spectrum of potential positive outcomes. While there is a critical need to protect the Financial District and Seaport communities from sea level rise and storm surges, we are leveraging this necessity to support the interlinked challenges of public waterfront access and carbon emissions reduction. This will ultimately yield multiple benefits in comparison to a conventional gray infrastructure solution, optimizing limited space for flood protection as well as transit, walking, bicycling, and public space improvements.

Fostering equitable outcomes

Through its focus on the interconnectedness of systems, a resilience approach underlines the imperative of addressing inequities across multiple dimensions. For example, the East Harlem Resiliency Plan, to which Sam Schwartz contributed, aims to help a diverse, mixed-income community along the East River prepare for sea level rise; its development process highlighted the deep connections between access to mobility, public health, and disaster vulnerability.  Increasing affordable transportation options with an All Ages and Abilities (AAA) bicycle network, adopting designs and policies for critical transportation infrastructure which ensure evacuation routes work as needed in emergencies while providing public open space at other times, and planning new pedestrian connections to expand waterfront access will enhance mobility in tandem with environmental justice and emergency preparedness.

Key Principles

While resilience-building can yield significant returns, careful planning is vital to success. Key principles for resilient responses to this crisis should include:

Cross-sectoral

This moment is underlining how federal, state, and local governments all play a role in resilience. As we learned in our Port Authority work, lines of responsibility need to be mapped and defined to maximize effective cooperation. The agency created a single point of contact for recovery grants and climate adaptation projects; this ensured it could effectively communicate with federal agencies, as well as state and local agencies and offices of emergency management, to keep the public informed about impacts to agency facilities and operations. This concept also extends geographically: regional-level coordination is vital as shocks do not stop at jurisdictional boundaries.

Resource-efficient

In a fiscally-constrained environment, practitioners must be able to make the case for why resilience is a sound investment. Our experience advising the City of Toronto on the King Street Transit Priority Corridor highlights how dramatically prioritizing transit can be accomplished at relatively minimal cost if a compelling case is made to stakeholders and the public with the support of strong leadership.

Resilient crisis responses may start as quick interventions, but can serve as blueprints for long-term improvements. At the outset of the COVID-19 crisis in Milan, Italy, some street space was converted to temporary bicycle lanes with low-cost materials such as traffic cones. The city’s Strade Aperte (Open Streets) plan will permanently expand pedestrian and bicycle facilities as early as this summer, aiding social distancing and offering transit alternatives.

Humble

Resilience-building is work for the long-term. Practitioners should take a generational perspective; the decisions they make could lock in policies and infrastructures that will shape our world for decades to come. It is sobering to note that the modernist “towers in the park,” with their widely-documented downsides, emerged in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic, in part as a public health measure.

Rooted in Meaningful Engagement

All of the above relies on meaningful engagement to understand a community’s distinct strengths, risks, and priorities. Practitioners should be especially focused on centering the voices of BIPOC, low-income communities, and other people who have been systematically excluded from planning processes. Physical distancing requirements should further encourage the use of creative engagement techniques including virtual open houses, online staff office hours, and even augmented reality (AR); a resource hub from the National Technology Network provides best practices for mitigating the digital divide in virtual engagement.

Conclusion

What this pandemic, which has impacted every person on our planet, reveals clearly is our shared fate. Our safety and wellbeing is meaningfully tied to that of everyone else. Our responses need to reflect this reality, by making our systems—and thus our communities—more resilient.

¹ World Bank, 2014. “An Expanded Approach to Urban Resilience: Making Cities Stronger.”

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