By Bruce Schaller, City Lab, May 4, 2020
The oldest trope in America is back: Cities are bad. Cities mean density and density means human contact, and human contact, in the crucible of the pandemic, means illness and death.
That idea is hardly new. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote during urban epidemics in 1800: “When great evils happen, I am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from them as consolations to us. … The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation; and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” Indeed, the epidemics that repeatedly swept through American cities in Jefferson’s time were exceptionally lethal: In 1798, yellow fever killed 2,086 people in New York City — one in 30, or the equivalent to 280,000 dead New Yorkers today.
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