Remembering the Health Benefits of Urban Density

Emily Badger writes of a painful realization in major cities during the pandemic: “The very thing that makes cities remarkable — the proximity of so many people to one another — is now making them susceptible in a pandemic. Density, suddenly, is bad for our health. And we are trying everything we can think of to dismantle it.”

But Badger writes in response to that realization, in an attempt to, “reconcile the benefits of density for a healthy society with the threat of density in a pandemic…” There is plenty of evidence available to accomplish that goal. 

In practical ways, density makes possible many of the things we need when something goes wrong. That is certainly true of hospital infrastructure — emergency response times are faster, and hospitals are better staffed in denser places. When one store is closed or out of toilet paper, there are more places to look. When people can’t leave home for essentials, there are alternative ways to get them, like grocery delivery services or bike couriers. When people can’t visit public spaces, there are still ways to create public life, from balconies, porches and windows.

More examples of the benefits of density—and the shortcomings of sprawl—follow, to make that point that density has been good for us, and will be again soon.

Planetizen collected previous articles on either side of this theme in a previous article, "Debating the Future of Cities, and Urban Density, After the Pandemic."