A radical new vision for our cities
Highlights
- Professor Mark Nieuwenhuijsen calls on cities to prioritise people over cars to create healthier, greener and more liveable communities.
- He shows how cleaner air, quieter streets and more green space can improve public health and quality of life.
- He encourages governments to invest in walking, cycling and sustainable urban design to build cities for the future.
While bunkered down in his Barcelona apartment, in the depths of the coronavirus shutdown, Professor Mark Nieuwenhuijsen started noticing something different.
“The traffic noise was gone, and in its place, you could hear the birds singing … lots of them, and it really makes a difference, you know?”
Like most of the world’s cities, Barcelona is normally a soundscape of car horns, engine noise, human voices and industrial activity. But when the strict stay-at-home measures came into force, the city streets fell quiet, leaving the birds — and other animals — to fill the silence.
People noticed this in other cities, too. Sydney had become “a city that looks dead but sounds alive, with birds chirping and the wind blowing”.
A half a world away in Bangalore, journalist Raghu Karnad described the surreal sound of nature in India’s biggest tech hub.
“I could never have imagined it possible, in an Indian city, to wake up not to the sounds of traffic but to the sovereignty of bulbuls and mynahs over the morning air.”
The constant din that is characteristic of our cities is not only an environmental nuisance, it’s also a threat to our health, linked to ailments like poor sleep, hearing loss, stress and even heart disease.
But for Nieuwenhuijsen, a professorial fellow at the MacKillop Institute for Health Research and one of the world’s leading environmental epidemiologists, the return of birdsong to our urban centres held a more symbolic message.
“When you start to hear nature come back to the city, it allows you to reimagine what a city can be,” he says.
“It makes you realise that cities don’t have to be noisy and full of cars, these things that we know have a negative effect on our health.
“We can make our cities more liveable and more attractive to both humans and nature, and we need to make sure we sustain some of these things in the long run.”
Breathing easy
A few weeks into the lockdown long haul, our urban centres also began to see more visible changes.
We saw crystal-clear cityscapes in places that are usually plagued with air pollution, and postcard-worthy snaps of snow-capped Himalayan peaks, seen from northern Indian cities for the first time in decades.
In China, air pollution monitors showed plunging rates of nitrogen dioxide, a noxious gas emitted by motor vehicles, power plants and industrial facilities.
At the time, Professor Nieuwenhuijsen predicted the pollution reductions “may have prevented more than 9,000 premature deaths [in China], a figure higher than the number of deaths caused by the virus”.
“We felt this was a good development to come from the lockdown there, because millions of people die in China due to air pollution,” says Nieuwenhuijsen, who heads up the Air Pollution and Urban Environment Program at Barcelona’s Institute for Global Health.
Even in Australia, which ordinarily has some of the world’s cleanest air, satellite data showed that some — but not all — of our cities experienced improved air quality.
However, these positive effects on the world’s urban environments came on the back of a global health crisis.
“We began to see that the virus itself was a lot more deadly than was first envisaged, and it was taking a lot of lives in places like Italy and Spain, where air pollution levels are a lot lower than they are in China,” Professor Nieuwenhuijsen says.
