The decline and fall of urban America

They’re calling it ‘revenge travel’: the desire to make up for the touring opportunities we all lost when we were locked down in our pandemical homes. As a keen professional traveller, I confess I’ve got a fearsome case of this bug: I’ve spent the past 20 months going just about anywhere I can, playing catch up.

Here’s a brief list of the cities I have visited since mid-2021: Tbilisi, Seville, Munich, New Orleans, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Bangkok, Yerevan, Rome, Istanbul, Athens, Da Nang, Nashville, Los Angeles, Florence, Phnom Penh, Tucson. I could add a dozen more, but you get the gist. I’ve missed a terrific number of domestic social engagements; but I have recently seen quite a lot of the world and, more pertinently, seen how the urban world is coping post-pandemic.

Conclusion? Every city has suffered in various ways, and the scars are visible. In East Asia the lingering lesions are psychological: they are all still wearing masks. In Europe, normal unmasked street life has returned, but shuttered shops, gyms and restaurants show a throb of economic pain persists. Some business districts – e.g. the City of London, in my home town – are taking a worrying time to recover that rush-hour vivacity. It may never be what it was.

However, there is only one country where I have actually wondered: will these cities ever recover? Could they be in terminal decline? And that country is the United States, the home of the modern city as we know it, the birthplace of the skyscraper, the elevator, and the idea of ‘downtown’.

American cities have complex problems nationwide, and each has its own braided mix of post-pandemic difficulties, but I will take three towns to symptomise the major issues.