Life after the corona: Are we moving away from the city? – Radar

The city is struggling these days, and not just because of the unreal silence that now hangs in otherwise busy neighborhoods. After a slowdown in city flight for several years, the gap between families leaving the city and those who join it has been growing in most Flemish city centres since 2017. Last year, for example, new residents of foreign nationality led to population growth in Ghent, but the city also recorded a record number of Belgian gentenaars departing. According to the latest report by the Population Service, it is mainly young families between the ages of 25 and 35 who turn their backs on the city with or not with young children.
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The city is struggling these days, and not just because of the unreal silence that now hangs in otherwise busy neighborhoods. After a slowdown in city flight for several years, the gap between families leaving the city and those who join it has been growing in most Flemish city centres since 2017. Last year, for example, new residents of foreign nationality led to population growth in Ghent, but the city also recorded a record number of Belgian gentenaars departing. According to the latest report by the Population Service, it is mainly young families between the ages of 25 and 35 who turn their backs on the city with or not with young children. The figures contrast sharply with the pleas of architects and urbanists for urban and other core sstudy, and many experts fear that the Corona crisis will further intensify the trend. French real estate agents are seeing interest in urban homes wane, Le Monde reported this week, as it grows in rural homes. “The arguments for compaction are as valabelas if they used to be,” says sociologist and space expert Pascal De Decker (KU Leuven). “If we live more compactly and more closely together, we avoid sky-high spending on rural utilities, but we also reduce our use of space and mobility pressures. The positive effects of compaction on the environment and climate are undeniable. The only question is whether people want to hear these arguments in times of social renunciation. In 2018, more than seven out of ten Flemings dreamed of open or semi-open buildings, the Flemish Housing Survey found. De Decker seems to be based on the chances that the Corona crisis will further strengthen the Flemish allotment dream and that we want to live even more privately in the future: “Those who have doubted a house in the city or beyond will probably now decide more quickly for the second option.” Or as one real estate agent in Le Monde puts it: customers are currently not looking for a house, but a place. Our dominant housing model also supported a self-protection reflex for Corona, the sociologist points out. “Last year in Genk we conducted a survey of 20 and 30 years of age who had left the city in suburbs. The main argument for choosing a house with a large garden, preferably with a hedge around it, was that you didn’t want to sit too close to your neighbors. The vast majority are not against the city, but they are against the hunt for life. What appeals to them is the idea of a closed territory in which they can keep their neighbors at bay and isolate themselves from the rest of the world. A defensive reflex that is likely to increase: As long as we don’t have a vaccine, Corona is pure advertising for the private family home outside the city.” Still, it’s dangerous to follow our gut feeling and think we’re safer for Covid-19 in an allotment than in the city, says Flemish builder Leo Van Broeck. “Cities do not sign on the maps showing the number of cases of 19 cases per thousand inhabitants. On the contrary, the rural provinces of West Flanders and Limburg, as well as allotted areas, are more affected and the Brussels region is doing better than Flemish-Brabant. One possible explanation is that police can more easily control social distancing in cities than in allotments, but also that city dwellers can call convenience stores and superettes within walking distance, where there are also fewer people than in supermarkets.” Advocating for densification and more sensible, smaller living: it sounds strange that we now have to stay at home as much as possible and put our houses to the test. “Telework, the children who study at home, with all the family members who are constantly living under one roof: then you need space to keep it livable,” says De Decker. Many of the existing urban and social housing is not equipped with long-term quarantine situations. Especially in a small apartment or studio with little light, fresh air and movement space, it is more difficult to maintain the effort for weeks than in a house with a garden. In the city, the urge to go outside is greater anyway, but this is all the more true for very small houses. Which brings us to the need for more greenery in the city, another pain point that rediscovered the quarantine and influx in the scarce parks.” The Corona Crisis is a reality check, agrees the Flemish architect. “Compaction can only be successful if it is qualitative, and this crisis reminds us that we need high-quality housing and high-quality urban planning. A mixture of stacked group apartments and above all many terraced houses with garden, with space for collective and private greenery, terraces and roof gardens, but also with space for children to play, relaxation room, privacy and the presence of amenities and public transport. Such houses are automatically child-friendly, adaptable for the elderly and suitable to stay “in your room” because high-quality houses are by definition lockproof and vice versa.” This is not the time to focus on the opposition city against the country, warns Van Broeck. “This useless paradox has not been mastered in the past and has completely missed the real challenges. The landscape is much more broken than the city, and the densification is about living in cores, not about bringing everyone together in the cities. Depending on your preferences, this core can be a village, a city or a big city and must have more and better landscaping anyway, but the underlying idea is that such cores are easily accessible to public transport, require fewer stops and make us less dependent on car journeys.” The obligatory housework has taught us in recent weeks that we can physically distance ourselves from our workplace in the office.” , while the proximity of the shops is no longer necessary: that is what we have at home delivery for. However, these are not arguments for further fragmentation, says Van Broeck. “It seems clear to me that it is not going to get back to business. Let us appreciate the lessons of the last few weeks and not go to the office to do what we do just as well at home. But we must also set priorities. Working from home and delivering from home does not give us the right to kill nature.” In the city, the number of walking meters per family is about five to seven meters, explains Van Broeck, outside slightly a hundred meters. In a city centre, a courier or postman can therefore easily serve several families more than in a scattered building. “The same applies to home care, garbage collection and stray salt trucks. In addition, allocations cost the municipality significantly more through the construction of roads and roads, sewers, gas and water pipes and the like. The cost per family can be up to twenty times higher than in the city.” In the long run, the allotment culture is more deadly than the coronavirus, Van Broeck says. “Every heatwave in our country alone causes thousands of additional deaths, and then there are the victims of traffic and particulate matter. In general, the quality of life in allotments is not even so good. Housing satisfaction studies confirm this. The messages, the sports activities of the children, the meeting with friends, a night in the cinema or in the opera: in an allotment you will soon need a car. Then there are the kilometres saved with homework and home deliveries.” There are good skyscrapers and other tools to live in the city qualitatively, emphasizes Pascal De Decker, as well as models to make the city greener and more climate-friendly. “Only urban politics too often opts for the use of classic apartment buildings, which means that we have many bad examples. In many places where there is space, standard apartments are chosen without asking who they serve. These houses are not suitable for families with children or less mobile elderly people. Even quality green has never been a real priority in the city. For example, we have strongly encouraged urban exodus and suburbanization, and saturated our cities with unadapted homes and neighborhoods that are sometimes carried to the wire. A transfer action is possible, but then of course we have to build new quality apartments first”. It is up to the politics and the real estate sector that Fortschriexperts, Van Broeck agrees. “The Corona crisis provides painful proof that we need to fully commemorate our housing model and urban planning. But it also creates new opportunities: sometimes people need to be pushed harder on the facts before they want to go far.””