Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 752

Last night I watched this Munk Dialogue with historian Niall Ferguson . (Some of you may remember that I wrote about a previous dialogue with Malcolm Gladwell a few weeks ago.) One of the sobering lessons of history is that, without a vaccine, we're probably not yet in a position to talk about life after COVID-19. At least in the short-term, this is going to be life with COVID-19.

Here is an excerpt from an article Niall wrote talking about how " a second wave could capsize Trump ."

In history, all the great pandemics have come in waves, including the Black Death of bubonic and pneumonic plague in the 14th century and smallpox in the 18th century. The first recorded plague outbreak — in Athens in the 5th century BC — had three waves: in 430BC, 429BC and 427 to 426BC.

In some cases, the second wave was worse than the first. Take the great influenza of 1918-19. The first official recorded outbreak was at a Kansas army base, Camp Funston, in March 1918. But the global peak of mortality was in the second wave of October and November. A third wave affected some areas of the world in early 1919, principally England and Wales and Australia.

The 1957-58 influenza pandemic hit Hong Kong in mid-April 1957. It reached America in June and produced a surge of deaths among teenagers that autumn. But there was a second wave in January-March 1958. There were further spikes of excess mortality in early 1960 and early 1963.

The other topic I was left thinking about from the dialogue is what all of this does to US-China relations, and more broadly relations between the West and China. Even before this pandemic, Niall had been arguing that Cold War II had already begun. Today's news that China is planning new national security laws for Hong Kong certainly doesn't help.

Azeem Azhar's recent newsletter, titled " Don't call time on the megacity: cities will learn and adapt ," is a reminder of the tensions that cities face. There are forces of attraction. And there are also forces of repulsion.

Cities all around the world continue to create wealth and lift people out of poverty. But they also repulse people through traffic congestion, housing supply shortages, and overcrowding (which is distinct from density ). Generally though, the forces of attraction have tended to outweigh the forces of repulsion, which is why the world continues to urbanize.

As Azeem points out, the first city believed to have reached 1 million inhabitants was Rome. It happened some 2,000 years ago. In the 1930s, New York then became the first city to reach 10 million inhabitants. And today, the 10 largest urban agglomerations in the world look something like this:

Outside of Japan, all of these city regions are expected to add many more people by 2030. Missing from this chart, however, are cities such as Lagos, Nigeria. Between 2018 and 2050, the UN estimates that 35% of the growth in the world's urban population will come from just three countries: India (+416 million), China (+255 million), and Nigeria (+189 million).

Long live the megacity.

Late 19th century and early 20th century architecture and industrial design is known for the axiom, "form follows function." I think of the German Bauhaus School when I hear this, but supposedly it can be attributed to American architect Louis Sullivan . Either way, it was meant to represent a functionalist approach to architecture and design, which was, as is often the case, a reaction to what had come before it.

It was Modernist architects eschewing decorative elements or what was referred to at the time as "ornament." If it didn't serve a functional purpose, it was to be removed. Nothing was to be superfluous. And similarly, if the function of something didn't change, there was no need to change its form.

Of course, if it was truly all about function, one could argue that there should have been a great deal of variation in the resulting forms. But instead, the designs that emerged out of schools, such as the Bauhaus, are some of the most recognizable in the world. That is true even to this day.

Which is why I think this is a great line from Witold Rybczynski (taken from a recent post about the book iBauhaus): " It is also a quintessentially Bauhaus example of form follows predetermined aesthetics rather than form follows function ." Ouch. The difference here is that Witold obviously isn't a fan of the Bauhaus or of Modernism, whereas this period of time is what inspired me the most as a student of architecture.

Photo by  Marina Reich  on  Unsplash