SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

Image 1: Image of Sao Paulo and life in quarantine. New York Times font.

What would happen if an experiment forced a quarter of the world's population to stay in their homes, the use of public spaces was restricted, we closed industries, offices, parks, and squares in our cities, we told humans to avoid contact, and we cover our faces with masks while we seek to lead a normal life? The answer would be that this is a perfect recipe for chaos.

The reader knows that reality surpassed fiction. We are living the craziest social experiment we could have ever imagined, and the guinea pigs are ourselves.

In this experiment, we have been deprived of face-to-face contact between loved ones, relatives, friends, colleagues, colleagues, and practically the vast majority of the subjects who build our social life, impacting in an unsuspected way on the economy, the environment, politics, social processes and emotional states of people, among others. In this experiment on a global scale, we have also seen the direct impact on our cities, reflected in diametrically different actions in managing the crisis.

The different practices that have emerged to "mitigate" and "adapt" cities in the face of the health emergency have generated multiple criticisms, but have also opened questions about the role of public institutions and the State, the need to sustain the habits of current consumption and the ability of people to act collectively, resist and face uncertain scenarios such as those generated by the Covid-19 pandemic, and which will undoubtedly not be the only one that we must face as citizens of the 21st century.

The perfect anti recipe

It is no news to anyone that the responses of countries to curb the number of infections have been dissimilar, especially between East and West, and until today, just as there is no vaccine against Covid-19, there is no silver bullet for say for sure what is the infallible strategy to stop the pandemic without significantly affecting the freedoms of people in cities.

Understanding that China's strategy of totalitarian control is not applicable in much of the world, and in contexts where the restriction of people's freedom is difficult to discuss, the truth is that only time will tell us which has been the correct strategy.

In the meantime, we have to try solutions with the latent risk of making mistakes hard, or else, adopt collective solutions in a supportive, dynamic and agile way, which allow us to reduce not only the risks of contagion, but also allow us to shed light on it. value of those changes in habits that we have had to adopt forcibly - such as reducing our consumption levels, restricting the amount of unnecessary trips with their respective emissions, or being aware of the importance of taking care of mental health as well as the other dimensions of human well-being -, changes that, if they last, could improve the quality of life of millions of people.

Image 2: New York before and during the adoption of strict measures to face the pandemic. Source on Reddit.

Deprive the public, or from the Private to the Public?

In this experiment there are multiple hypotheses; On the one hand, the public (people) have been deprived of their freedom of movement, with the assumption of avoiding an increase in infections. On the other hand, this experiment has opened the debate on how much force we should pass from the private sector to the public sector. At the end of the day, it is the states that are bailing out companies and there is no free food in this game. Along these lines, the United States is today the country with the most cases of Covid19 infections in the world, with New York as the epicenter of the disease, displacing Italian, Spanish, and Chinese cities. The US strategy, strongly criticized - perhaps precisely because of the lack of it - today offers a package of economic measures of 2.2 trillion dollars (millions of millions of dollars) never seen before.

An informed critic about the significant difference between the resources received by local governments, the basic care network and public health, versus the amount of resources that are allocated to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on individuals, large corporations and small businesses, I would give for extensive. For now, this visualization of the distribution of resources can help inform the discussion and draw your own conclusions.

Image 3. People dining at a restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden, on March 27, during the outbreak of the Covid19 pandemic. Image source. Jonathan Nackstrand, via CNBC.

On the other hand, in northern Europe, an unusual case in how to face the health crisis has been Sweden, where restrictions on people's freedoms have been minimal, appealing to the responsibility and conscience of people to maintain social distance. In Sweden, with more than 5,800 infected and 373 deaths, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven defends himself against criticism by stating that in his country "the right actions are being taken at the right time" and "based on science." Interesting model, but with the exception that unlike many countries,

… Sweden enjoys one of the highest levels of interpersonal trust and trust in authorities in the world. In other words, “what the Prime Minister said is because he is right, and we must follow his responsible instructions”, the common Swedes will think.

A different case is that of many countries where levels of trust in the authorities are on the ground and where 3 out of 4 people feel dissatisfied with democracies, as is the case in Latin America. In our region, the situation has already put the capacity of the public health systems in cities like Guayaquil, Ecuador in check, and indistinctly, countries have taken more restrictive measures, not free of criticism, from total quarantines to progressive quarantines , imposed by governments that enjoy increasingly little popularity.

In the case of Chile, where in the middle of quarantine the President is photographed in what was the epicenter of social protests, prior to the Coronavirus outbreak - causing the outrage of many who today must take refuge in their homes -, the Government recently announced an economic plan of more than 11 billion dollars to face the impacts of the pandemic, equivalent to 4.7 percent of the national GDP. How much of this package is to mitigate the impacts on the economy, and how much is to adapt or prepare for similar events, opens spaces for a new debate as well.

It would be appropriate to think, not only for Chile but for all countries, what percentage of our GDP we should invest to transform our cities and our institutions, both public and private, into laboratories capable of responding to these challenges with experimental actions that allow us to react in a timely manner, not necessarily with absolute certainties, but to try agile solutions for the present and the future.

In other words, how do we make ourselves less fragile in the face of events like this, and manage from disorder and chaos to leverage forces to get ahead.

The anti-fragile answer

According to the Lebanese essayist and researcher Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2019), every complex system, such as human or natural, has the property of being an “anti-fragile” system, that is, it can deal with uncertainty, volatility, disorder and stress generating beneficial changes for the system itself. In this sense, shocks mobilize action despite the uncertainty, triggering reflection and discovery processes that go in the direction of improving the system.

Responses such as keeping transportation systems operational to ensure movement of essential jobs and the supply chain, keeping frontline workers safe and promoting teleworking, responding immediately to delivery and removal of goods , or decompressing places of high public call promoting social distance, are questions that all countries are trying to solve today, with greater or lesser success. Along these lines, an interesting and comprehensive global guide to measures in the most diverse areas is made available by the NACTO agency, which can be reviewed here.

In this social experiment that we are living, it is time to observe, show solidarity, learn and act. We have seen with concern how in a matter of hours, thousands of people have had to evacuate in recent weeks megacities such as Delhi in India due to the threat of lack of food, seeking refuge in rural areas, or how thousands of people in Latin America do not count with basic services such as water or shelter, being exposed to the pandemic. On the other hand, short-term measures have emerged during quarantine, such as new ways of promoting community life such as those seen on the balconies and terraces of Italian, Spanish - and Chilean cities, such as # ElGranBalcón that we promote from Ciudad Emergente , to great ideas on how to decompress large urban areas and generate a balanced territorial development between urbanization, natural areas and productive landscapes. For more ideas along these lines, I invite you to review this open letter to city planners with 10 implications of Covid19 for cities written by Mariela Alfonso.

Some of these lessons have to do with repositioning old and infallible recipes how to design 15-minute neighborhoods, that is, where all basic services can be acquired within a walkable distance, or tactically consolidate the infrastructure for the modes of transport that they do not pollute like the bicycle -and they allow us to stay physically active avoiding emotional collapse-

… Or innovate in emergency housing solutions for people who are homeless and where the duty to comply with quarantine becomes a challenge of proportions. However, it is more relevant than ever to give the importance that the role of the State and collective action deserve to get out of it.

Image 5: An Ideal Home. Illustration by Heath Robinson, 1933

Covid-19 will pass, but it is important to remember that new experiments of this type are predicted, either due to social inequality, the impacts of climate change, or the loss of trust in democracies, among others. Just as this pandemic had been clearly warned by science, it is time to open our eyes to the other warnings that science has given us for decades with climate change, or political science has warned us about the rampant inequality with that we design our cities. As Taleb invites us to think, if we consciously prepare, our response to uncertainty will be to play games.

Let's think about how this social experiment is leading us to adapt our houses, our neighborhoods, our public spaces, sources of work, and human relationships, among others. These changes should serve as a lesson for us to be more prepared to face the uncertainties that are presented to us as citizens of the 21st century.

Javier Vergara Petrescu

Co-founder and Executive Director at Ciudad Emergente

@vergaraptrescu