Cities Must Focus On Fostering Antifragility In The Post-Pandemic World

With cities and states across the country beginning to allow non-essential businesses to reopen, the real social and economic costs of the coronavirus pandemic are likely to become increasingly vivid. Local leaders in both the public and private sector will undoubtedly be challenged and questioned about the actions they took and those they didn’t. State, county and municipal officials will develop more rigorous infectious disease mitigation plans. New offices and departments will be formed to coordinate local and regional responses to future outbreaks. Laws, regulations and standards around sanitation, hospital capacity and large gatherings will emerge.

While all of these measures are laudable, it’s important we build the capacities cities and citizens need to thrive in volatile and uncertain environments so we’re not always planning for the next crisis while repairing the damage from the last one. One solution might be to use machine learning and big data to allow us to better predict various catastrophes and crises, whether natural or human-made. Yet, no matter how hard we try or how much technology we throw at predicting the future, there will always be some events, scenarios or outcomes that remain unpredictable. The probabilistic nature of the universe itself seems to place boundaries on predictability. Additionally, even if we could prepare for every conceivable catastrophe, the resulting preemptive policies could create consequences even worse than the disaster they’re anticipating—an argument some experts have applied to the current crisis. An appropriate response must be chosen that doesn’t create a sequence of increasingly negative effects. It’s not enough for a city to predict a disaster. It has to also be able to predict the consequences from its response to the disaster. 

In the absence of foresight, many state and municipal leaders have been trying to create cities capable of withstanding disasters, remaining flexible during them and bouncing back quickly after them. Some of the world’s largest cities have made these concepts of robustness, adaptability and resilience a top priority, with some even appointing Chief Resilience Officers to coordinate citywide efforts to withstand and recover from crises. 

Yet, while these efforts are valuable, they don’t solve the root problem: cities, and the systems, companies and citizens that constitute them, are highly fragile. They cease to function optimally or entirely when stressors and shocks emerge. Even small disruptions like traffic jams can cause cascading and compounding ramifications. Large disruptions like the present pandemic and the resulting lock-downs have the potential to cripple a city for months and even years after. Resiliency and related risk management and mitigation strategies can help our population centers rise to meet the challenges presented by unforeseen or unavoidable disasters, but they can’t protect us from ourselves, from our own inability to find opportunity in uncertainty, upside in volatility, value in complexity and clarity in ambiguity. 

A more optimal, albeit more difficult, solution is to build urban systems that are antifragile, a quality exhibited by systems that actually improve with volatility. The concept of antifragility was proposed and popularized by New York University Tandon School of Engineering’s Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, in his 2012 book Antifragile. Antifragility differs significantly from the categories of resilience, robustness and adaptability. Resilient and robust systems are those that are able to withstand shocks and bounce back quickly after them. Adaptive systems are those that are able to respond effectively in the wake of shocks. Antifragile systems, however, don’t just bounce back or even bounce back better, they thrive and improve because of, not in spite of, volatility and uncertainty. They don’t respond or react to change, they feed on it. 

Some cities and institutions have attempted to define resilience in a way that seems to encompass the concept of antifragility. For example, The Rockefeller Foundation’s now-defunct 100 Resilient Cities initiative defined urban resilience as “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.” Although this definition of resilience might at first seem similar to antifragility, it fails to capture the most important elements of the latter. First, antifragile systems improve because of shocks, not in spite of them. Second, the growth the 100 Resilient Cities definition mentions means growth of the status quo. The aim of resilience is to restore things to normal with minimal disruption or maintain the growth of the status quo in spite of disruption, but the aim of antifragility isn’t to restore the norm, it’s to transform it. Things shouldn’t go back to the way they were after a disaster. They should improve as a result of it. If they return to their previous state, they will remain as fragile and destructible as they were before. The goal of urban crisis management needs to be to harness disruption to create net value, not simply recuperate losses.

This vision of urban antifragility is not implying that shocks, chaos, disruption, disaster and crisis are good. Inasmuch as they harm people, such occurrences are never desirable. It is, however, claiming that such events can produce some good outcomes. For example, the company that releases a new product to meet critical needs during a crisis and emerges stronger than it was before, the laid off worker who turns her hobby into a business that increases her income, the elevated rail line that’s damaged in a disaster only to become a public park that unifies the surrounding neighborhood. While not perfect examples of antifragility, such examples do require citizens who demonstrate antifragile characteristics and thinking. It’s not about stemming the rise of the flood waters. It’s about using the flood water to generate power.

Creating whole cities that exhibit some antifragile dimensions, even if true antifragility proves unachievable, can have a profound impact on how we approach unforeseen disasters. Such cities and their citizens would have less anxiety in the face of shocks and stand to gain as a result of the individual agility and creativity applied during the crisis.

So how do we accomplish this? While not easy by any measure, increasing urban antifragility can only be done through education. At their core, cities are a function of their citizens. Yes, cities are partially defined by their buildings, streets and geography, but it’s the people that determine the culture and character of a city and its institutions and structures. Thus, if a city’s citizens are highly fragile, so too will the city be. Any improvement to a city’s physical systems will necessarily be driven by the capabilities and creativity of its people, both leaders and citizens. Optimally, every citizen needs to be able to collect data, understand trends, make agile decisions, network effectively, learn new skills quickly and think creatively to not only survive, but thrive in any environment.

One practical recommendation is to start teaching entrepreneurial thinking skills in grade school. Entrepreneurs, perhaps more than other professionals, are uniquely equipped to thrive in uncertain times. Their success is predicated on taking informed risks in low-information environments, finding opportunity in complexity and turning chaos into value. Teaching these skills from an early age can help cultivate more antifragile citizens. Currently, entrepreneurial thinking and skills are mostly taught at the collegiate level and in select high schools, but the objective today is to teach entrepreneurship as a career option. What’s needed, however, is a curriculum that emphasizes the importance of entrepreneurial thinking as a life skill with broad application regardless of one’s career.

Additionally, we need to move away from an educational system that trains people to do only one thing in only one place. By doing so we create path dependencies that increase individual fragility. Specialization is beneficial in predictable, low-volatility environments, but in uncertain, high-volatility environments, specialization can slow or inhibit adaptation. The optimal state involves people with an array of specialties who can learn new skills and switch between specialties quickly and efficiently. If someone can only perform one job function, they won’t be able to recover if that function ever becomes obsolete or unnecessary. If someone is only comfortable living in only one place, they won’t be able to thrive if that city ever finds itself in a long-term decline. Professionals in an age of disaster and disruption need to have a diverse arsenal of abilities, able to do many things in many places. This helps create skill set robustness that can enable antifragility.

Finally, the ability for people to function independently is critical. We live in a hyper-connected society, where social and economic interdependence has created prosperous networks of ideas, people, products and information. These same dependencies, however, create convenient pathways for communicating harmful contagions, such as computer viruses, racism, subprime mortgage debt or COVID-19. They also reduce the ability of individuals and businesses to operate if access to key goods and services is limited or restricted. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, localism has been gaining traction as a solution to the disruption of the physical and social connectivity we’re accustomed to. By shifting the center of political, economic and social action away from countries to states and cities, communities have been able to develop more tailored policies, support local businesses and reclaim some semblance of humanity. This is similar to microgrids, which can connect to the main power grid but can also be disconnected for independent operation. Likewise, we must also push this decentralization down to the individual level by fostering more independent citizens. This is not suggesting that people must become survivalists, but basic knowledge on how to grow some of your own food, repair basic household appliances or fix your own computer would be an obvious starting point. It’s also not to say that cities should cut themselves off from the world. In fact, post-pandemic, people in the West are likely to realize that their greatest privilege is not the right to be alone but the right to be together. It is to say, however, that the more dependent we are on others, the more fragile we become. The benefits of interconnectivity are unassailable, but we can be extremely interconnected without being excessively interdependent.

In the post-pandemic world, it would be a missed opportunity for city and state leaders to focus solely on creating response plans and recovery strategies for the next outbreak. Preparing for the next crisis by evaluating the last one assumes the next one will be just like this one. The next crisis may not be anything like this pandemic. It may not be a pandemic at all. The only viable approach to ensuring our cities and citizens can emerge from the next crisis stronger is to foster urban antifragility. Building an antifragile city, a city that improves as a result of shocks, is not an easy task. If it’s even possible, such a city will have to be built from the bottom up, through the empowering of individual citizens. It will require us to rethink how we educate, how we work and how we live, but will ultimately allow us to thrive when crises arise, no matter how unpredictable.