Challenge to DC Area Urban Planning Bloggers -- Part I

I've been reading a lot of the local Urban Planning blogs and bloggers.

Some are "better" and some are less-so, for various definitions of "good". Some have more technical skills, and some have not so much. Others have a much better grasp of the fact that Urban Planning is after all less about sticking to design principles which might come and go in the same way that ladies' hemlines rise and fall in the breezes of Fashion, and more about creating habitable space.

Some stick so closely to the design principles that they promote a sort of Densified Urbanism which might be an efficient use of resources mostly because it excludes the personal automobile, but would be an existential horror to people who aren't sufficiently gregarious to enjoy living in beehives.

Some have a more humanistic idea that recognizes that different people have different desires and needs, and these create a vision of mixed spaces, with beehives for the bees and open spaces for the people that want or need more open space. Many of these are promoting a densification and urbanization of business districts in aging core suburbs, yet for the most part they are content to leave the residential surround to be more or less what it has been for 50 years and more: close-in suburbs which are inherently "walkable" and which could be much moreso if only they had better connections to mass-transit.

Yet all of these Urban Planners have a few basic assumptions. The most fundamental of these -- and reasonable given most of history since about the 1800s -- is that there will be steady and mostly predictable population growth.

There was a time, however, and a recent time in the grand scale of things, where there was effectively a near-zero population growth in the whole of the US. Yet the urbanized areas as a whole tended to grow because of migration from the rural areas to the metropolitian areas, a global phenomenon. It was only within the last few years that, globally, the majority of humanity now inhabit urbanized areas, though nationally, the US reached that watershed ahead of most of the rest of the world. It has been widely observed that while urbanization as a phenomenon is generally beneficial due to concentration of resources and facilities along with those who can contribute to the facilities and benefit from the resources, when good sanitation is lacking, urban areas are among the most deadly dangerous environments imaginable.

Yet there is another situation in which urbanized areas are the most dangerous place to be, and that situation has been seen here in the US within the last century. A hint in the form of a question: in which decade of the Twentieth Century did Census record an actual decline -- the only recorded decline of the US Census enumeration record -- in population, and why?

And here comes our Challenge:

In the fall of 2012, a global Pandemic struck the world. It was fast, it was universal, it was global; everyone got it with absolutely no exceptions except for a few paranoids hiding in deep facilities, and when they finally emerged, they got it too. The fatality rate was about 50 percent under the best of conditions and with the best of care; without the best care in the best facilities the Pandemic left about one in 7 people alive. Those who died all died within about 72 hours of developing symptoms; those who lived were almost fully recovered -- and were thereafter totally immune -- within one week of onset of symptoms.

The symptoms were, of course, absolutely horrible. People felt a sudden wave of weakness, followed by a few hours of a sort of giddy febrile clarity clouded by a sense of impending doom. About 24 hours after onset, a deep coma-like sleep set in. Those who would die developed symptoms not entirely unlike smallpox, though the pustules were the size of golfballs that arose in all non-bone tissue. In the doomed ones, these expanded until other than for their skeletons, the victims effectively deliquesced and in dry climates the liquids dried to a fine powder and could blow away in a light breeze. In those who would recover, the coma-like sleep lasted for about 72 hours after which the patients woke with minimal flu-like symptoms that faded rapidly into deep hunger. After eating their fill, almost all were totally recovered in another two days.

The pandemic seems to have been so universal as to time of onset that one theory posits that the entire world had been infected perhaps a few months earlier, with the infectious agent spreading universally with a long-lasting but nearly asymptomatic prodrome. Only when there were no non-infected left to infect did the agent transform into an exceptionally lethal form. Another theory posits that this was no natural phenomenon but rather a manufactured one, of unknown source; the primary agent spread in the manner of every mild influenza or common cold, but a globally applied aerosol agent drifted down from above to trigger the mild infectious phase into the violent pox. Evidence for the second theory is that it doesn't require a feedback mechanism to explain the universal onset timing. Evidence for the first theory is that the first massive Emergence was in cities, and the likelihood of surviving was inversely proportional to the population density of residences and workplaces. Where people lived packed together in hives of humanity, they died in heaps, like ants that have been sprayed. Due to the collapse of sanitation and product distribution as well as of system management, possibly as many survivors died of knock-on effects (such as unchecked conflagration) as victims died of the pox.

And as with any of the pox family of diseases, persons with old-world ancestry survived at a much higher rate than those with new-world ancestry. With smallpox, old-world-heritage persons died at the rate of about 1/3rd of the infected while new-world-heritage people died at the rate of above 99-percent in the century following the introduction into the New World by the soldiers of Hernan Cortes. There will never be a renascent Maya civilization primarily because there are no remaining Maya. For them, if not for everyone else, their ancestral prediction came completely true: 2012 was, for them, the end of the world.

The resulting global situation is as follows:

Global population is about what it was in 1900, about one billion humans on planet Earth. Population distribution is about what it was in early 2012, but divide all numbers by Seven. Global resources are about what they were in early 2012. As the Pandemic occurred, start to finish, globally, in only the month of October 2012, in the Northern Hemisphere most harvests were already in, and in the Southern Hemisphere almost all planting had been done. South and Central America are effectively depopulated except for population centers with large and high concentrations of people mostly of old-world ancestry. For example, Buenos Aires is once again a city mostly comprising a mixed German and Italian ancestry speaking an antique Spanish, and not all that many of them.

You are now an Urban Planner in a post-apocalyptic world. The physical infrastructure largely remains intact; the InterNet still works just fine as does the constellation of satellites in orbit, and in North America there are about five times as many cars as people, with about half of those cars being fairly efficient recent models. There are almost three PCs per person if you want to go out and collect them. The stores are full of all sorts of goods and everything still works. The hospitals are mostly in good condition once you shovel out the piles of skeletons and hose down the walls and floors. Agriculture is as good as it ever was, once you put survivors in the seats of harvesters and combine tractors; North American agriculture is intensively mechanized and often highly automated. At the beginning of November, in North America there is about six times as much livestock available as is needed. Nobody is likely to go hungry. Not that many people are likely to suffer medical problems in the short-term; there may be only about a sixth as many doctors and nurses and paramedics, but there are also only about one-sixth as many patients.

There is also about six times as much housing as is needed...

Nothing much is different except that there is only about one-sixth of the population.

As an Urban Planner, how do you react?

Densification? Sprawl? Growth? Recycling of brownfields into new development? Abandonment of perfectly functional "ruins of the old life"? Folding the many remaining functional aspects of the old into something new? What is your population policy?

All of the "givens" are postulated above.