The future of cities post-pandemic has been on peoples minds a lot lately with the impact of increased home working and people moving to the countryside. To me, this is a great cause for concern since remote working is likely to continue long after the pandemic, and if people don’t return to their offices, there will be little reason for economic activity in city centres in the first place. Yes there will still be leisure and tourism in the city, but unless more people have the time and money to travel and visit, these places will eventually move out of the city with the people.
This made me think about whether there is such a term as a “donut city”, where the main economic activity takes place around the outskirts rather than the physical centre. Searching for articles about possible post-pandemic London scenarios, I stumbled across this article:
So it appears there is such a term as a “doughnut city”. Now the thing to remember with Houston, like most American cities is that they were built around the car, so economic activity would shift to wherever has the easiest highway access. The UK is not so car-centric as a result of a less developed road network, but I fear that unless there are incentives to get people back onto trains and into central offices, city centres will hollow out with economic activity moving to suburban areas, making them unsustainably populated and congested with more reliance on private transport.
PS: As this thread is about donut shaped cities in general, are there any that exist simply because it has expanded around a natural obstacle that sits in the middle, such as a mountain or lake?
This made me think about whether there is such a term as a “donut city”, where the main economic activity takes place around the outskirts rather than the physical centre. Searching for articles about possible post-pandemic London scenarios, I stumbled across this article:
Following on from this, I began to search for whether an example of a doughnut-shaped city already exists and was intrigued to find this from an online glossary:How COVID-19 could make our cities doughnut-shaped
In London, visitors to retail and recreation spaces fell by up to 76.7% during the hight of the pandemic.
- The effects of COVID-19 on our cities are ongoing.
- In the UK, the past few months has seen high street names such as Debenhams and the Arcadia Group go under.
- Closures are concentrated in city centres, whilst smaller towns and suburban high streets are emerging stronger as people embrace shopping locally again.
- As a result, our cities could take on a doughnut-like shape.
DOUGHNUT CITY
The term Doughnut City is used to describe a phenomenon that affects the physical shape of some cities of the North American Sun Belt. It consists of the concentration of urban activity on the ring road (where the newest and most advanced generation of housing estates and office parks are located) and the parallel physical disappearance of all that remains inside (the interior is affected by an accelerated process of obsolescence that leads to the demolition of a multitude of buildings). Viewed from a European perspective, the Doughnut City is a phenomenon that goes against nature. If in the cities of the Old Continent proximity to the center means an added value, in the Doughnut City quite the reverse is true: the most eligible urban areas are on the final periphery.
The first casualty of the "doughnut effect" is the historic city center, which was abandoned in the 1960s by a migratory flow of businesses, offices, and homes for the new suburbs that have arisen around the ring roads that were built in the United States in that decade. The next victim would be those very same suburbs that were deserted by the white middle class as new bypasses appeared. On these arose a more modern generation of office parks, residential areas, and shopping centers. History would then repeat itself: the suburbs abandoned on the first ring road would be occupied by emigrants, which would augur the start of a degradation process that would lead to fresh demolitions. The logic of the Doughnut City is therefore expansive: the central gap increases in size as the urban "mass" moves away from the core to the final ring road.
The Doughnut City par excellence is Houston. In the 1960s its downtown area was abandoned in favour of the suburbs that sprung up alongside Loop 610, the city's first ring road (in the late 1970s three times more offices were constructed beyond the downtown area than in it). When Beltway 8 appeared, the white middle class made for the new developments that arose along this second urban ring road. The suburbs abandoned on Loop 610 were occupied by Latinos and Asian emigrants. History is currently repeating itself, in this case with the construction of the Grand Parkway. The new mass of the doughnut forms the Edge Cities, which are already over 40 km from the old historic centre. The central hole is huge: in the late 1980s 38% of the downtown surface area had dematerialised; its buildings had been demolished and the resulting plots of land transformed into car parks.
So it appears there is such a term as a “doughnut city”. Now the thing to remember with Houston, like most American cities is that they were built around the car, so economic activity would shift to wherever has the easiest highway access. The UK is not so car-centric as a result of a less developed road network, but I fear that unless there are incentives to get people back onto trains and into central offices, city centres will hollow out with economic activity moving to suburban areas, making them unsustainably populated and congested with more reliance on private transport.
PS: As this thread is about donut shaped cities in general, are there any that exist simply because it has expanded around a natural obstacle that sits in the middle, such as a mountain or lake?
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