If it says you have to stand six feet apart, that's what you best do. The COVID microbe is doing the same thing for biology: lecture it all you want, but it pays no attention. Because I work on climate change I've spent the last three decades trying to convince people that physics and chemistry can't be argued with, forced to compromise, made to negotiate.
There's no silver lining to the pandemic, but it can teach us some lessons, and maybe the most crucial is: physical reality still matters. Many of us have lived lives that seemed to grow slowly more detached from the physical world-screens took up more and more of our time. But what exactly generates a real attachment to the community over the long term? What provides the stickiness or emotional and practical commitment to stay rooted in a community over time?Ī landmark Knight Foundation report produced by Urban Institute surveyed over 11,000 Americans to explore this very topic, developing a rich and authoritative dataset on what drives community attachment across a diverse set of metro areas and demographic groups. Others say the crisis will spur a reimagination of social infrastructure and urban life together as innovative leaders start to look ahead, become more nimble and revisit city plans to build back better, more resilient communities.Īs the pandemic causes us to evaluate where and how we live, understanding what connects people to place is more important than ever. A recent Harris poll revealed that 39% of city-dwellers are currently considering moving to a less dense community. Some predict a new wave of urban flight as public health, employment and affordability challenges intersect with an upsurge in remote work and connectivity that allows for more mobility. With your help, we can compile current insights, fleeting thoughts and deeper reflections about the ways we live now so that going forward we bolster, modify and reinvent cultures that improve quality of life for ourselves, our children, and future generations.Ĭities face an uncertain future in the wake of Covid-19. As tragedies unfold before our eyes, we aim to capture the lessons they teach. More recently, we undertook the New Map of Life™ initiative, which focuses on envisioning a world where people experience a sense of purpose, belonging, and worth at all stages of life. Since the founding of the Stanford Center on Longevity, we have advocated for a major redesign of life that better supports century-long lives. Your insights can contribute to the reshaping of social norms, systems, and practices that shape our collective futures. Going forward, life will be different and by compiling the insights we have today we can inform and guide the culture that will inevitably emerge from our collective experience. The premise of the New Map of Life:™ After the Pandemic project is that we have a fleeting window of time that affords us an unprecedented opportunity to examine our lives. Indeed, through ambivalent eyes we also recognize ways that life is better as we shelter in place. Just as sure, sheltering in place allows us to appreciate precious details of our lives that we have taken for granted: the appeal of workplaces, the comfort of human touch, dinner parties, travel, and paychecks. Tacit assumptions about health care systems become clear as we see how they function, fail to function, and have long underserved large parts of the population. The fragility of the global economy becomes glaringly apparent as critical supply chains faulter, unemployment surges, and markets vacillate.
The suddenness and starkness of this transformation allows us to examine daily practices, social norms and institutions from perspectives rarely allowed.
Seemingly overnight, we experienced profound changes in the ways that we work, socialize, learn, and engage with our neighborhoods and larger communities.įor a short time, before new routines and practices replace familiar old ones, we can see with greater clarity the positive and negative aspects of our former lives. The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing into focus a once invisible culture that guides us through life. It is said that culture is like the air we breathe.
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