Between the coming of spring, a few epidemiology curves trending downward, and some promising medical news, it’s beginning to be possible to think about life after the coronavirus lockdown. My focus here will be on how place and space might be affected by the quarantine experiences.
Commercial space, political space, social space, and personal space are all likely to be rethought, in some cases temporarily and in others permanently. Shopping malls, already in trouble as a sector in the past few years, look ripe for reinvention or continued shutdowns. Telecommuting will be fascinating to watch relative to office real estate. If people can do all of their job tasks working from home during the lockdown, the old arguments against remote work will be hard to resurrect after it’s over. (I’m not saying co-location does not confer benefits: if anything, we will probably appreciate them more fully once we return to the office.) Look for the average number of square feet of office space per worker to continue its drop. Could a better-run WeWork-like entity find a market in the new normal of office space?
Just as there are important differences between moving a residential college course into online mode on short notice and ground-up redesign for the virtual medium, so too will work practices have to evolve as their locus changes. Here’s one example: hospitals are rushing to implement telemedicine and millions of patient visits have been successfully conducted. The workflow for the healthcare providers, however, is kludgey: the videoconference network, the hospital’s billing and record-keeping software, regulatory compliance software from the state (in the case of scheduled pharmaceuticals for instance), and the electronic signature all come from different vendors so the doctor or nurse becomes an ad hoc systems integrator with no additional time allotted in the daily schedule for the extra effort and frustration.
Moving from a physical office visit to a virtual one includes updated workflows, additional infrastructure — both technical and cultural/organizational — and potentially new models of care: outside specialists can be patched into the video call, and patients’ home environments can be assessed in ways they cannot in a clinic. The location, size, and functions of clinics, showrooms, cubicle farms, and call centers can all be rethought given the creativity and will to do so. One quick win: hiring people with physical disabilities should become easier without the need for special transport or workplace modifications if the employee works from home, which can be anywhere with Internet connectivity, not just within reasonable drive time.
One fascinating aspect of the rush to online instruction is the cleverness and speed of students who hack the process. In China, students bombarded their learning package with 1-star reviews in the hopes the Apple app store would take it down and they wouldn’t have schoolwork. Plenty of students are learning about computers by reading the browser code for their quizzes: “if answer = 40 then points = 10” is pretty easy to figure out. Even some Zoombombers started out as high school kids putting 2 and 2 together (their own experience with organizing meetups) with a few Google searches for dial-in codes. Rethinking the workplace means rethinking security.
Another level of space is administrative jurisdiction. The economic shutdown was intended to “flatten the curve” of ICU admissions to prevent the kind of overload to the medical system that New York City is confronting as I write. For unknown reasons, some places are getting hit much harder than others: Lombardy vs Rome, New Orleans vs Tampa, Detroit vs Denver. Part of this pattern could be due to innate immunity or silent exposure that confers immunity: one survey of asymptomatic people in Iceland suggests 50% have the virus with no measurable signals. Obviously Iceland is far from representative of anything, but one piece of an economic re-start will have to be much wider testing to detect levels of potential community spread (and eventually community safety). That testing might be connected to contact tracing efforts, which could improve safety at the cost of privacy. In whom will people be confident with that trade-off? Banks, post offices, and insurance companies obviously market and sell trust, but are any of these good candidates for holding sensitive medical information at such large scale? Trust in tracing will be a major challenge: a Washington Post poll this week found few people excited about tech companies performing this function, and only about 40% of the sample was both technically capable and willing to trust _any_ entity.
The regional governors’ groups formed in response to the pandemic might wither away after the crisis, or maybe they will persist with new kinds of charges: water use, immigration, voting, education, and transportation might be candidates for regionalized response. For the time being, getting a better handle on the reasons for the dramatic geographic disparities in sickness and health will be imperative to restarting the global economy.
Continuing on the theme of jurisdiction, how will public health agencies be situated going forward? Where do they operate? How are they funded? The WHO, CDC, and many state health departments have failed their charge of late; might there be appetite for new models of monitoring and response? Part of a return to normalcy will be a vaccine, and the Gates Foundation’s efforts to accelerate this process are obviously welcome and well-placed. Even so, getting tens of millions of doses to those who need protection most will be a massive effort. When vaccines become available, who gets them first? Best guesses have those vaccines ready in 12 to 18 months: in the interim, we need to build the social infrastructure of allocation and administration. What agencies will take the lead, and why? As with ventilators, we will need to pay attention to how scarce resources are allocated. As in many biomedical scenarios (blood and organ donation foremost), markets are a suboptimal tool for making these decisions.
The reinvention and redefinition of social space will be a critical aspect of the recovery. Because college football is a massive economic engine that supports essentially all of college athletics (except for Duke and Marquette basketball and a few other outliers), it has been in the national spotlight: everyone from hot dog vendors to sports bars to Disney (parent of ESPN) is suffering right now. College athletics could be permanently reshaped by this virus. Absent a vaccine, which cannot possibly be discovered and deployed in 4 months, how can colleges and universities allow tens of thousands of ideally screaming fans to stand inches apart? How many $5 million-a-year head football coaches will collect paychecks if no games are played? Will Covid-19 mutate to Covid-20 this fall and if so, will immunity to the former carry over? As employees, pro football players have rights and responsibilities college players — “scholar-athletes” as the euphemism has it — do not. The NCAA and NFL are unlikely to walk in lockstep as each copes with life during a prolonged pandemic.
Other social spaces will evolve as well. Yoked as they often are to malls, many movie theaters do not appear to have a robust future. State fairs, rodeos, religious worship, and concerts will be unrecognizable for a time. Orchestras in the US do not enjoy the level of community or financial support their counterparts in Europe see, so will some weaker organizations be forced to dissolve? French headlines predict many of the country’s art galleries will close permanently after the lockdown. Museums and other non-profits the world over will suffer possibly catastrophic economic losses and/or implement new admissions practices that enforce social distancing. What about parks and beaches? In densely populated areas especially, might the pandemic drive innovative urban planning to create new parklands, potentially reclaimed from roads closed to auto traffic in favor or pedestrians or bicycles, as in many European efforts?
Finally, the pandemic will forever change personal space. Breaking up via teleconference is now known as Zumping, I’m told. Watch parties virtually connect responsibly isolated friends or dating partners. Activity across various Facebook properties is surging, as is Netflix traffic. I saw a virtual doctoral dissertation defense and millions of students will experience graduation from a screen. Birthday parties have become truly creative, from drive-by honk-a-thons to surprise video greetings from celebrities. What is called “social distancing” is really a misnomer: we need our networks more than ever, but the imperative is to maintain _physical_ distance at the same time we struggle to remain socially close to the people who matter.
Video conferencing is incredibly different from what AT&T envisioned in the Picturephone almost 60 years ago. Multi-party meetings, shared screens, fake backdrops, and side-channel text are all important features. But the privacy implications of Zoom/Webex/Teams/Google Meet need to be explored. Here’s a thought-provoking essay. Leave aside for a moment the question of what data and/or metadata the conferencing provider is collecting. Zoom is terrifically intimate and we see into the home lives of co-workers, interviewees, students, and other people around whom norms traditionally created physical distance and structure. Now, there are dogs or babies or personal mementos to mark that 2-dimensional screen as theirs, but now also mine. School systems are wrestling with this privacy issue already: I as a parent would be extremely uncomfortable having random teachers see the bedroom of my child, but that may be the only room with quiet and/or wi-fi access and/or adequate workspace.
The whole camera-on/camera-off question is getting a lot of attention in pedagogical circles. I may want to see faces to track student engagement and slow down or speed up my lecture based on various kinds of feedback. At the same time, people may be shy, want to hide a disability, feel unsafe from stalking or similar behavior, or have religious issues with video representation. I used to teach asynchronous online classes to students who worked at Saudi Aramco, and those female students operated under very different cultural rules compared to what I was more familiar with. Mandating cameras-on there should not be a unilateral or casual call, or anywhere else for that matter.
The digital divide, long remarked-upon but timidly addressed, consists of more than computing and bandwidth. Without public libraries or coffee shops as “third places,” working or learning from “home” should not be understood simply as the replication of prior social interactions. What we hold private, dear, and shared used to be governed in large measure by physical space: architecture professor Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language analyzes all manner of structures in terms of privacy gradients among other factors. Now we need to build both the grammar and vocabulary of personal video representation, and perhaps surprisingly this derives heavily from our physical location. Class and other signaling via our clothing, our speech, our transportation, and our diet is familiar. (Some people hate Android phones because their texts show up in green bubbles with limited functionality on Apple devices.) How we will use this new medium for the discourse of social segmentation and hierarchy — and for much else besides — will be fascinating to watch.
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