As the country continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, childcare is among the toughest challenges for parents and employers alike.

Prior to the pandemic, about half of U.S. families reported having trouble finding care for a young child, according to the Center for American Progress. That number shot to nearly two-thirds this past spring as childcare centers closed and other in-home caretakers were told to stay home during lockdown orders.

“Now more than ever, children have come to the forefront,” says Shadiah Sigala ’06, as she holds her two-year-old on her lap during a PCM interview conducted via Zoom.

She speaks from personal experience as the mother of two young children, but also as the co-founder and CEO of Kinside, an app that assists employers offering childcare benefits. When an employer partners with Kinside, its employees can use the service to browse and find reliable childcare options for their families.

Sigala’s impetus for her newest entrepreneurial effort was inspired in part by her own experience with motherhood.

“I had a kid while co-founding my former company [Honeybook.com]. I now had a baby, and then my family leave period ended. How do I do this as a working mother? So I instituted the first family-related benefits, policies and organizational structures at the company, which was undergoing a big baby boom. As a company executive I asked myself, what is the experience like for my employees? And how do we show that we’re paying attention to this? So definitely, this was born out of personal need and our employees’ needs.”

Sigala says the pandemic has exposed the fact that the childcare system in America is both fragile and under-resourced. “To give context, about two-thirds of households in the U.S. are dual working households where both parents work,” she says. “On top of that, working mothers take on a larger load of childcare. Working mothers average 22 hours of childcare per week, on top of their full-time jobs.”

The pandemic has only made things worse.

“It really doesn’t matter if you are a frontline worker, an hourly worker, which is usually who suffers the most silently, or if you are middle management or an executive at a company. We’re all in this together,” she says. “And this is usually where we find an inflection point—where those in power and influence experience a pain point and they feel compelled to fix it.”

So what are employers doing to alleviate the challenges of childcare for their employees? “They realize that this is literally impacting their very bottom line,” says Sigala. “On top of productivity losses, it is estimated that about one in five working parents is saying that either they or their partner are considering leaving the workforce. Imagine that 20 to 30% of your employees are experiencing this? That is a significant portion of your employee base.”

“The most obvious incentive is that employers are offering subsidies for childcare for the first time, especially those employers who have employees that are essential and on the front lines. For example, we’re seeing many health organizations, who employ our nurses and doctors, folks who are absolutely essential. In order to keep them going, their employers are offering a childcare subsidy.”

Other employers are making their parental benefits more robust. That can mean anything from maternity or paternity leave to support for new parents who are returning to work, including childcare.

Sigala points out that working parents, and particularly mothers, are not only caring for children but sometimes caring for multiple members of their family, whether they live with them or not.

“Employers are really looking at this very holistically. We’re find­ing that suddenly they want it al,l or at least more, when it comes to family benefits. Whereas before, they were considering adding one new benefit; now they’re considering several, ranging from mental health to fertility to childcare. And whereas these benefits used to be considered perks, organizations are strategically moving their energy and efforts of family benefits into the ‘essential’ bucket.”

As coronavirus cases spiked across the country in the fall, companies continued to recalibrate their work environments. Working from home may have seemed a temporary measure back in the spring, but it’s now becoming a more permanent solution for many.

Microsoft announced in early October that it will allow some of its employees to work from home until at least 2021, joining others such as Target and Ford Motor Company, as these companies struggle to figure out how to arrange offices in a way that keeps workers socially distanced and safe. Facebook took it one step further, allowing employees to work from home permanently.

While a move away from an in-office culture makes it harder to create connections and serendipitous moments of creativity, Laszlo Bock ’93, founder and CEO of Humu and former head of People Operations at Google, told the Wall Street Journal that right now, checking in on how an organization’s team members are doing is the most important thing an employer can do to keep them productive. No one should be surprised, he said, that the productivity gains that accompanied the move to remote work have now leveled off as fatigue has begun to set in.

“It was people being terrified of losing their jobs,” he told the Journal, “and that fear-driven productivity is not sustainable.”

Still, the experience with remote work has caused some companies to consider whether their employees need to be in the office at all, says Carol Fishman Cohen ’81, chair and co-founder of the career reentry firm iRelaunch. “Whereas face time in the office used to be a priority, the pandemic has forced a reckoning of whether productivity levels are equal or even higher if employees are working virtually.”

According to a recent study released by Upwork, it’s estimated that an astonishing 14 million to 23 million Americans intend to relocate to a different city or region as a result of telework.

The implications, Fishman Cohen said, are huge, no matter whether you’re an employer or an employee. “For employers, if roles are not location-specific, companies can search for talent anywhere in the country, and for some, the world. They can rethink their expenditures on real estate and business travel. For employees, taking location out of the equation means they can live anywhere they want and can move out of high-cost-of-living urban centers to smaller cities or more-remote locations if they choose.”

Disruption and Opportunity

The ability of workers to work from home, however, depends on a couple of things. Obviously but importantly, it depends on the survival of the organizations that employ them—and in times like these, that can be a stressful concern. It also depends on technologies that are being adopted in a rush and often stretched to their limits. For organizations and their employees alike, the name of the game during the time of COVID-19 has been coping with the resulting disruptions.

Organizations of all kinds have felt the shockwave from COVID-19 on their notion of business as usual, says Jose Low ’96, HR business partner at Port Logistics Group. The degree of impact, however, depends on the industry, the type of organization and its previous level of technology.

Adapting to the challenges has been especially tough for small businesses in which higher levels of in-person, face-to-face involvement and interaction are required to get the job done, according to Low. “Larger and medium-sized companies that have incorporated technology in the last few decades to allow a portion of their workforce to remotely connect in and to virtually collaborate and complete tasks and workflows seemingly have been able to flex and minimize disruptions,” he explained.

Organizations have also faced disruption due to their dependence on the global economy, he noted. “Despite individual functions and organizations being able to adapt more quickly through technical capabilities, we’ve seen and experienced that a disruption in some part of the supply chain network still significantly impacts other areas—affecting the production and delivery of products as well as performance of services.”

However, despite  all the roadblocks the pandemic has dropped into the world of work, it has also created a few opportunities.

Fishman Cohen works with employers to create “returnships” and other programs to bring back mid- to senior-level talent after career breaks for childcare, eldercare and other reasons. A ‘relauncher’ herself, Fishman Cohen’s return to work at investment firm Bain Capital after an 11-year career break was the subject of a Harvard Business School case study.

“Even before the pandemic, relaunchers typically feel pretty isolated in their experiences while trying to return to work after a multiyear career break,” says Fishman Cohen. “Now, with unemployment levels having spiked and still remaining high, ‘relaunchers’ are feeling more vulnerable, because they picture themselves standing in line behind millions of newly unemployed, which makes them feel their chances of getting hired are even slimmer.”

But the pandemic has also created an urgent demand for medical and technology professionals to return to work from retirement or a career break. “Any prior stereotypes and hesitations typically associated with hiring back older workers disappeared in our country’s hour of need, and these professionals reintegrated back into the workforce efficiently and effectively,” says Fishman Cohen.

For his part, Low believes that the pandemic is giving us a glimpse of what work may look like in the future. “It’ll take time, and different areas will experience different rates of change, including traditionally labor-intensive areas that require care and fine dexterity and manipulation.”

Workplace Newbies

Of all of the members of the workforce, perhaps the hardest hit are the young people just preparing to enter it. They’re the ones Hazel Raja, senior director of the Career Development Office at Pomona College, worries about on a daily basis.

“In terms of challenges, one thing that I don’t think people talk enough about is the mental and emotional impact of the pandemic on these young adults,” she says. “Our alums and students may be juggling a lot. Some may have different responsibilities off-campus compared to the responsibilities they had when classes were in session on campus; so their ability to set up informational interviews and/or to do career research may be difficult because of their living situation, household responsibilities, part-time jobs, etc. It’s no doubt a challenging time for many, but the transition from college is already a bumpy one without a pandemic.”

Raja points out, however, that there may also be some upsides to the COVID era that college students and new graduates should bear in mind. Even though current opportunities to connect in person with potential employers and recruiters are limited to virtual programming and events, for some this may become an advantage.

“Students who thrive in an online environment will feel a lot more comfortable engaging behind the screen. This environment removes some, but not all, of the awkwardness and nervousness that may be attached to new introductions,” she adds. “Moreover, the pandemic may open up space for students to really consider what they want to focus on as far as career prospects. Many new industries and career fields will be created through this pandemic, and our students’ liberal arts education can set them up beautifully for what’s on the horizon.”

“Crickets.” That’s all Daniel Post Senning ’99 of The Emily Post Institute—great-great-grandson of the grande dame of etiquette herself—says he heard about manners the first two weeks after COVID-19 hit the U.S. hard. But etiquette-in-place soon became a thing.

The first manners-related issue that came to the institute was surrounding the touchy issue of the greeting: “Can I say no to a handshake?” Of course, says Senning. For him, that’s not a manners question so much as a safety precaution—and safety supersedes etiquette.

What is in the realm of etiquette is how you now manage a greeting, he says. He has a few pointers: Use your voice, use your words, smile with your eyes, and maybe take a cue from another culture. Senning has adopted a gesture that is common in the Muslim world: placing a hand over one’s heart and taking a small bow or offering a slight nod. “It’s really sweet. It’s really personal. It actually sets up a physical boundary—like, I’ve got you in my heart. I’m holding you close, and I’m not extending my hand.”

What about masking? Is it proper to ask someone to put on a mask? Senning says the key is to avoid shame, embarrassment or insults. “This all sounds really obvious but ‘Could you please stay away from me? I can’t believe you’re not wearing a mask,’ is a very different thing than ‘I’m so much more comfortable when people are wearing masks. Would you mind stepping back a few feet?’ Big, big difference in tone, but also in terms of how you’re setting up the relationship and where your expectations are coming from.”

When the reminder is offered in the spirit of camaraderie, good-natured accountability and humor, a gentle nudge can go far and be appreciated, he says. “The vast majority of rude behavior is unintentional and something someone would self-correct if they were even aware of the effect it was having.”

What about Zoom etiquette?

It’s a multipurpose medium, says Senning. But there are a few things to keep in mind. Whether it’s a business call from your home office (or kitchen pantry) or a personal conversation from your easy chair, you’re accountable for questions of discretion and privacy as well as distraction. You must offer the courtesy of explaining who’s in the room and whether you will be recording. “When you’re broadcasting someone’s voice into a room, you should let them know who’s hearing it, both as a question of discretion and privacy. They should know your intern is sitting there hearing every word or that you’re in a public space where people could be walking through.”

And turn on that camera to avoid the pajama assumption. Because if you don’t, “it reads very plainly that that person, for whatever reason, isn’t prepared, isn’t working in a way that they’re capable or willing to show what they’re doing at that moment.”

What you’re doing at the moment at the grocery store matters, too. During a pandemic, do you buy that first apple you touch? Yes, says Senning. Knocking on fruit and smelling it is not COVID-appropriate behavior. “It’s important to adjust our behavior and take into account others.” Doing so demonstrates a measure of grace and poise that sets people apart, he says.

Living in social isolation does raise the specter of people forgetting how to behave around others. Empathy is a skill, and researchers who study it measure vagal tone—the degree to which your heart rate fluctuates based on your mental or emotional state. Vagal tone atrophies as we have less human-to-human interaction. So our capacity to empathize and the systems that regulate our biological responses based on the emotional cues we’re getting weaken if not exercised.

But all will not be lost, says Senning, because those systems can also get stronger very quickly. Face-to-face interactions improve vagal tone rapidly. Empathy improves with practice.

So although the pandemic has turned everything inside out and upside down, including proper manners, one thing remains true about etiquette regardless of the times, says Senning: It’s about making choices that prioritize relationships.

“I like to advise people to proceed with a lot of compassion for themselves and for the people around them,” says Senning. “So, proceed with compassion and understanding, and you’ll probably be OK whatever comes up.”

Severine von Tscharner Fleming ’04 is a national leader in a growing agricultural movement encouraging young farmers to grow food to be sold close to market and serve as stewards of the nation’s dwindling supply of irrigable farmland. She is a founding board member of the Agrarian Trust and the director of Greenhorns, a grassroots cultural organization for young farmers that produces an annual literary journal for working agrarians called the New Farmers Almanac. Additionally, she runs Smithereen Farm, a certified organic wild blueberry, seaweed and orchard operation in Maine that hosts summer camps, camping and educational workshops. She also speaks nationally and internationally on land access, food sovereignty and the needs and vision of the incoming generation of farmers and ranchers. PCM’s interview with her has been edited for length and style.

PCM: Have you seen an uptick in interest in gardening or urban farming—what some are calling “pandemic victory gardens”?

von Tscharner Fleming: There’s a massive increase in gardening and local food. CSA [community-supported agriculture] signups are up. Local meat sales are up. Farm-club computer ordering is up. Fresh vegetable sales at grocery stores are up. This has been documented by garden centers, nurseries, hatcheries, inquiries through goodfoodjobs.com, through ATTRA, Americorps, WOOF USA and our own viewership at youngfarmers.org and Greenhorns.org.

PCM: What do you think is motivating people to plant victory gardens?

von Tscharner Fleming: Tending to living beings, tuning in to Earth life—this helps the vibrations. It’s an antidote to computer-brain and Zoom bingo. It also seems like tuning in to the crisis is anxiety-creating and debilitating, boring and trying and stressful. We also saw a major increase in home cooking and bread baking. All my friends who sell flour and local grains had huge demand.

PCM: What kinds of problems are people wrestling with as they try to up their game or expand their investment in gardening?

von Tscharner Fleming: Everywhere, the weather is abnormal. Abnormally hot, abnormally dry, abnormally wet. It’s an abnormal time for gardening, but diversity and organic compost are very strong tactics overall.

PCM: How sustainable do you think this growing interest in growing our own food is? Is it sustainable or just something people are doing until things go back to normal?

von Tscharner Fleming: Do I think that the world is going back to normal? No. There is no normal; there is history, and there is the future. Unemployment hit 30 percent during the peak of the shutdown. Many of those jobs will not come back. Our economy will be transformed by COVID and by the shakeup of small and medium businesses. This means that there will be more edge. Digital workers will be, as they already are, moving to small towns for a better lifestyle. This alone will provoke a lot of changes. Then there are all the jobs that are imperiled by automation. While many people live in cities and don’t have access to land for gardening,  those in the suburbs already do, and here in the U.S., our countryside is wide open—so many small towns with main streets are ready to be revived, rural areas that turned into monocultures for export that need to be diversified. Such a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurship and reshuffling of our farm economy.

PCM: Do you think this could have a lasting effect on people’s relation to food or to the environment?

von Tscharner Fleming: Every economic crisis provokes changes, especially with the youngest generation, who have to confront the difficult job market. The last big pulse of the 2008 economic crisis was a huge recruitment episode for new farmers with record application rates at the organic training farms.

PCM: What has been your own experience with gardening during the pandemic?

von Tscharner Fleming: In our gardens at Smithereen Farm we are growing more storage crops—corn, potatoes, garlic. I’m freezing as much as I can—tomatoes, squash, kale, greens—mostly because we’d rather have way too much food than not enough, and so we can comfortably host and feed our guests with food we’ve grown. It feels like a great time to have a stocked sanctuary.

PCM: Do you have any recommendations for people who want to get started on a victory garden?

von Tscharner Fleming: There’s marvelous literature on this subject. Go to your public library.

One impact of the pandemic that remains to be seen is its effect on young learners. There are widespread concerns about K–12 learning loss—particularly among children who were just learning to read and students on the wrong side of the digital divide who lacked consistent access to high-speed Internet, computer devices and, in many cases, a suitable space to study.

Still, there are some ways in which the pandemic has been like pressing a fast-forward button for K–12 education.

In California the state budget signed in June included an astonishing $5.3 billion in funds to mitigate lost learning, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order directing state agencies to bridge the digital divide so that all students have access to devices and Internet service.

“Basically, the ‘I don’t have enough money,’ ‘We can’t do it because we don’t have the budget for it,’ well, that is no longer a viable excuse,” says Trang Lai ’91, director of educational services at Fullerton School District, a K–8 district where all students are now provided with iPads and mobile hot spots if needed. “And now that we’ve had it, one of those things in education and in life is that once somebody has something, it’s very hard to take it away.”

Make no mistake, there are students in California and across the country who still don’t have satisfactory home connectivity, but the idea that a device and Internet access are at least as essential to education as textbooks is now set.

Technology alone does not move education forward, however, says Justine Selsing ’11, a former elementary school teacher now at Harvard University Graduate School of Education, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in technology, innovation and education. “Every school I had worked at had so many tools and had invested so much in those technology tools, but they weren’t always being used to do better things,” she says.

“A classic example that we’ve talked about in some of my coursework is districts have invested so much in these smartboards [interactive whiteboards] and then have not made the investment in the human capital—in supporting teachers to use them in innovative ways,” Selsing says. “So a lot of teachers, myself included, would use them to do things very similarly to what was being done before. Just inputting the technology is not enough to make those changes.”

Now that almost every teacher in America has had a crash course in Zoom methods, some mental roadblocks about technology have been removed. Yet it’s not only teachers who’ve adapted; there’s a new realization about what students can do, says Lai, who sat in on a Zoom art class of mostly kindergarten students.

“These are the little ones, and they’re at home. And then I saw that on the Zoom screen, one patient child had had his hand up. The teacher finally said, ‘Oh, So and So, I see you have your hand up. Do you want to say something?’

“And then you see him reaching to push the unmute button, and then you hear his cute little voice. We’ve got a little one who knows how to unmute and then share on the screen. I was just floored.

“What will stick? I believe that our belief in the ability of our students, including our very youngest ones, to be flexible, to adapt to the situation, is novel and new. If we didn’t have these outside pressures, I’m going to say it would have taken at least another five years for us to believe that our students are capable of a lot more than we give them credit for.”

Almost everyone’s goal is to get students back in classrooms as soon as possible, but some things seem forever changed.

Parent-teacher conferences and IEP (individualized education program) meetings—the annual planning sessions for students with disabilities that involve parents, teachers and administrators—are simpler and no longer require everyone being in one room.

Students who are home sick might be able to watch class on Zoom or view a recording when they’re feeling better.

Some home-schoolers who had increasingly flocked to for-profit online learning might be brought back into the public-school fold with online learning, depending on the family’s reasons for choosing homeschooling. And students who would benefit from classes at another school, whether it’s because of where they live, special needs or a desire for accelerated coursework, could have more options.

In addition, standardized testing, cast aside in K–12 education last spring out of necessity because of school closings, might be fading.

“I’ve seen schools where we are relying on this standardized test as the only goal for what our students should be able to achieve instead of thinking about how to really be prepared for the future,” Selsing says. “We have catastrophic change coming in our future as humans. And all of our students are going to need to be able to exercise leadership skills, are going to need to be able to research and figure out what’s true and false, to talk across an ideological divide, to solve huge problems. And I don’t think that teaching them to succeed on the standardized tests is the most important thing.

“I think that we have a lot of hope that this will be a time of redesigning schools to ideally look pretty different from how they looked before.”

Mental health went mainstream in 2020. Headlines about coping strategies and self-care proliferated as millions of people experienced anxiety, sleep problems and depression related to health fears, financial setbacks and social isolation during the pandemic.

More serious, the Centers for Disease Control reported that drug overdose deaths were on a record pace, perhaps exacerbated by isolation and difficulty accessing treatment. The CDC also reported that the percentage of people surveyed in June who said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous month had more than doubled compared to an earlier survey.

Still, there may be silver linings that emerge from the pandemic in terms of behavioral health care. “I think in many ways, this pandemic has destigmatized mental illness because it’s talked about so much more frequently,” says Stephen Smith ’17, founder and CEO of NOCD, a telehealth company that provides face-to-face online sessions with licensed therapists to patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I think the more we talk about mental illness and the challenges that people with mental illness face, the less stigmatized it becomes,” Smith says.

Besides normalizing openness about mental health, the pandemic has brought telehealth into the mainstream. Almost everyone from kindergarteners to grandparents has been on a Zoom call at this point, so the routine has become familiar. Physicians now use video calls for consultations that don’t require lab work or physical exams. Yet for mental health therapy, an online session can be even better than an in-person session. Evening and weekend appointments are more readily available to accommodate work or school schedules. And no longer must someone seeking help worry about being seen entering a psychiatrist’s or therapist’s office—or worse, sit in a waiting room with an acquaintance in awkward silence.

“We’ve seen that people are more likely to seek treatment online and open up faster,” Smith says. “It just feels less taboo for them.”

The bad news and good news is that business is booming for NOCD—pronounced “No OCD,” which in addition to therapy provides online support, including peer communities and self-help tools. “During the pandemic, growth has spiked twofold,” says Smith, whose company recently raised $12 million in funding to expand its services to all 50 states. Just a year ago, the startup he founded while still at Pomona was operating in only three states.

In depicting OCD, popular culture tends to focus on the meticulousness of a TV character like Monk or the contamination obsessions that cause compulsive hand-washing, but the disorder has many subtypes, involving various kinds of intrusive thoughts—including unwanted sexual, religious or violent thoughts—that result in compulsive behaviors performed to reduce stress.

Yet at a time when all of us are washing our hands for 20 seconds as recommended by the CDC, a person with OCD worrying about getting sick or infecting a vulnerable loved one might take it further.

“What many with contamination OCD will do is wash their hands until they bleed, to make their fear go away,” Smith says. “They also might go to a nearby clinic or to the ER to take tests and ensure that they aren’t ill, in order to prove with 100% certainty that they won’t cause their loved ones to become deathly sick. They do these actions in attempts to stop the crippling fear and reduce the corresponding anxiety, ultimately making their symptoms worse.”

NOCD therapists specialize in exposure and response prevention (ERP), a form of cognitive behavioral therapy most often recommended for treatment of OCD. ERP works by intentionally exposing people to situations that provoke their obsessions and distress while preventing the compulsive responses. Yet the model Smith has created has potential for many types of behavioral health issues.

“We’ve learned that using technology to treat people with mental illness is actually very effective,” he says. “Going forward, as we step out of the pandemic, we’re actually going to be able to use more technology to get people better. And that allows us to break down barriers that would typically prevent people from getting better in the past.”

Second Home, an innovative co-working space in Hollywood, has garnered a lot of attention due to its design features. Sixty pods, which occupy a large parking lot, are embowered with trees, are fancifully painted, and contain large workable windows that produce a sun-drenched environment for those settling in for a day’s work.

As its designer assured the Los Angeles Times: “One of the best aspects of living in L.A. is to be able to open a door and being surrounded by nature.” The region’s “close relationship with the good weather, hummingbirds and flowers is lost if you have stairs, elevators or corridors in the way. The goal was to work in a garden, where you can be indoors, but the outdoors is just a door away.”

But is Second Home, as has been touted, a sign of our post-pandemic future? The question also might be asked of the al fresco dining craze, in which restaurants and bakeries have crowded out onto sidewalks, or, as in Claremont, commandeered parking spaces and turned them into patios. The same goes for the slotting of bollards into streets to produce instant pedestrian malls in central cities and small downtowns.

Will these quick adaptations do more than provide a rapid influx of consumers and cash to prop up our faltering economy and boost employment? Those two results are essential, but I’m not convinced that the design interventions by themselves offer long-term solutions to the many and enduring social issues that plagued American cities before the pandemic and that have been further exposed by COVID-19’s sweep across the urban landscape.

Start with the novel coronavirus’s fatal power. As of early October 2020, it has killed more than 200,000 Americans, roughly 20 percent of fatalities worldwide. Those numbers have had a decidedly urban framing. Los Angeles, like New York City, has been among the epicenters in the United States, a location concentration that seems consistent across the globe.

Yet within urban America, some residents have been more impacted than others. The data is glaringly obvious in who has died, where and why—in large part due to age, race and ethnicity, poverty, class, education and neighborhood. The pandemic, in short, has exposed the fault lines that run through U.S. society. These fissures—which include spatial inequities, economic disparities and political inequalities—have segmented the urban landscape.

In this unsettling context, social distancing takes on new meaning. Ditto for Second Home’s chic if segregated pods, which only reinforce the fragmented, exclusive character of the modern workplace.

What interventions might we take to alter more radically the inequalities hammered into our built environments? Here are some of the related questions that students in the Environmental Analysis program grappled during the fall semester: Who has rights to the city? Who has unfettered access to a community’s public resources—its politics, policies and services, its streets and open space, its healthy and full life?

Social theorist Henri Lefebvre was an earlier source of some these queries, which he used to directly confront the capitalist state that was busily commodifying social relations and controlling city governments. The only effective antidote, Lefebvre argued, was a concerted effort to rescue “the citizen as main element and protagonist of the city that he himself had built” and the subsequent reclamation of the metropolis as “a meeting point for building collective life.”

His formative concerns have gained greater urgency amid the global pandemic, but whether they will gain traction is another matter. The news is not particularly encouraging, a point some of my students made when I queried them over the summer about what they were observing, thinking and reading. Luba Masliy ’22 sent me a link to architectural critic Benjamin Bratton’s sharp interrogation of the pandemic’s hollowing out of communal life: “As amenities that were once known as places in the city are transformed now into apps and appliances inside the home, public space is evacuated and the ‘domestic’ sphere becomes its own horizon.”

This inward focus has happened even in highly centralized Moscow, Masliy noted of her hometown. Although its downtown contains the majority of its urban functions—jobs, education, shopping and recreation—it has been diminished in one key sense. Before the pandemic, mass-transit rush hours dominated daily commutes. Now, auto-owning Moscovites have clogged the road. She was skeptical whether this gridlock will fuel demand for a more decentralized urban system and greater diversity of infrastructure and services.

Pauline Bekkers ’21 shared Masliy’s skepticism. She spent the summer back in the Netherlands and there observed a sharp uptick in the number of motorized vehicles on highways, despite her country’s longstanding investment in a robust bicycle-and-transit system. “People have such a negative image of public transportation,” she wrote, that “they’d rather take any other alternative.” Her hope was tempered: “As much as this is an opportunity for city governments to make radical changes in the urban landscape, it is also essential that we grab this opportunity to change attitudes.” She’d start with a real commitment to engage with the most vulnerable communities, a goal that requires urban planners “to completely reimagine what their planning process looks like and how they empower communities to build their own post-pandemic cities.”

That same argument is central to a book that Anam Mehta ’21 encouraged me to read: Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (2019). For Stein, the rise of the “real estate state,” a phenomenon he associates with New York and other global cities, is attributable to a rapid accumulation of real-estate capital since the 1980s. This concentration of wealth, he writes in homage to Lefebvre’s earlier insights, has secured “inordinate influence over the shape of our cities, the parameters of our politics and the lives we lead.”

To break that pattern will require planners and designers to envision a new and healthier urban society. That potential comes with a catch. The real estate state “is most firmly grafted onto municipal governments,” Stein observes, “because that is where much of the capitalist state’s physical planning is done.” This locus means that planners are “uniquely positioned at the nexus of the state, capital and popular power,” and as a result, they “sit uncomfortably at the center of this maelstrom.” The only force that can help these professionals “unwind real estate’s grip over our politics” and give them the freedom to dismantle the social inequities built into the urban fabric is the formation of a series of “mass movements to remake our cities from the ground up.”

Were that to occur, then this galvanizing momentum might finally secure Lefebvre’s imagined community and our collective and embodied right to cities that are habitable and just—an outcome that is as essential whether we are locked down or opened up.

Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History.