Will the coronavirus crisis kill big cities?

"The generalized urbanization of the globe and its planetary metropolization are the crucible of the health crisis," said town planner Guillaume Faburel in April in a column for the newspaper Marianne.

These were the first months of the coronavirus crisis. Strict confinement - the first - had just been decreed in France and many city dwellers had fled to the countryside to spend this confinement at home more comfortable.

It was also the time of the first analyzes on the crisis and Mr. Faburel, bearer of a radical vision in favor of a return to the countryside against metropolises considered "barbaric", regretted that the role of cities was not sufficiently denounced. .

It has since been. Large cities were first presented as an ideal breeding ground for the rise of the coronavirus, starting with the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan where it appeared.

"By their density, (the) new urban configurations bear the seeds of ecological blasts with a high potential for vitality", assured in Le Monde the epidemiologist Didier Sicart and the mayor of Neuilly Jean-Christophe Fromantin, shortly before the summer of 2020.

But the following months have qualified this type of analysis. Mr. Fromantin, who envisions a "world free from metropolises", and Mr. Sicart, thus evoked the supposed transmission of the pangolin virus to humans, a hypothesis since largely rejected.

Above all, the epidemic ended up developing at high speed outside of metropolitan areas, as in the United States where, after a first violent wave for large cities like New York, very sparsely inhabited states like North Dakota experienced a difficult fall.

Spontaneous contacts

This phobia of cities did not in fact wait for the current crisis. It is as old as the cities themselves, as the British historian Ben Wilson points out, who, in opposition to this tendency, has just published a book extolling the cities as the "most beautiful invention" of humanity.

"Throughout history, people have always predicted the destruction of cities, as if they were on the verge of collapsing because they are too complicated, not hygienic enough, plagued by crime ...", emphasizes he told AFP, tracing these fears to the Bible.

"The Bible was largely written by Hebrew prisoners who were taken to Babylon, this sprawling city, and who saw it as divine punishment and doomed to destruction," he notes.

Much more recently, in the nineteenth century, the rise of poor and polluted London of the Industrial Revolution, immortalized in the novels of Charles Dickens, prompted many intellectuals of the time to imagine covering England with "cities". green gardens with a limited number of inhabitants.

The current crisis is not, however, without a major novelty: the rise of new technologies has made it possible to widely generalize home work during times of confinement.

However, should we imagine, like Mr. Fromantin, that by giving everyone the possibility of (tele) working where they want, we will lose the luster of immense cities for the benefit of medium-sized towns?

In such a vision, cities are only of interest because they concentrate a lot of people in the same offices.

But for town planner Alain Bertaud, this is misunderstanding the real appeal of metropolises: they essentially multiply spontaneous encounters.

"It is very important in the job market, this permanent education which comes from unforeseen contacts", he notes with AFP. "And the city is more conducive to it."

"This stimulation can happen without there being a very high density", nuance Mr. Bertaud. "Silicon Valley is not a very dense suburb, like the inner suburbs of Paris. But people still have to meet face to face."

The town planner is not worried about the rise of anti-city discourse, even as clear-cut as with Mr. Faburel, because he hardly expects any major influence from it.

"In Asia, nobody says that cities are useless. They realize that urbanization has created extraordinary wealth," says Mr. Bertaud. "They remember what India or China was like fifty years ago."