Ask A City Nerd #5: Why Don't Urbanists Ever Talk About (x)

Welcome to Ask a City Nerd. Got a question you want answered? Or chopped up into bite-sized pieces so I can just answer the parts I'm interested in? (This is sort of what I did today — you've been warned.) Submit it here! Submissions are lightly edited for typos, grammar, clarity, and a reasonable amount of anonymity.

Now to today's question...or at least the first two sentences of it.

I have a question about a topic that a lot of urbanist content creators don't seem to really address often. And that is, urbanism in relation to those with immune deficiencies.

Before we get into it, I am going to pay this writer the respect of publishing their question (essay?) in its entirety, but it was just too long to open with the whole thing, so instead I'm going to have a sort of dialogue with it, piece by piece. (Normally, I ignore submissions that go on for hundreds of words, because they're usually polemics rather than questions, but I think there's a lot to dig into with this one. For future reference, though, if you don't want your question ignored or broken into bite-sized chunks, brevity is your friend.)

Also, I get a lot of questions in the form of, "Why don't urbanists ever talk about [thing that's important to me, specifically]." These tend to be pretty tiresome. The reality is, the discipline of urban planning intersects with just about everything: politics, culture, the environment, climate, public health...the list is really endless. On the one hand, this is what makes planning, or urbanism, or metrophilia, or whatever you want to call it, such fertile ground for content creation. On the other hand, you will never be able to cover every possible intersection, so someone will always complain that you didn't talk about their particular thing. I made peace with this long ago.

So, my first thought is, someone who is immunocompromised but plays lots of Cities: Skylines should definitely start their own YouTube channel. (OK, that's your compulsory flip response; now let's dig into it a little more.)

I want to keep this relatively anonymous and detail-free, but my partner has had some pretty major immune issues since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a result we just don't really leave the house when not absolutely necessary, and take every precaution we can when we do need to. I still support urbanist ideas and design philosophies, for those who can make use of them, and thus indirectly benefiting everyone, but I don't foresee myself being able to directly benefit from them myself.

First of all, I appreciate that the writer supports policy ideas that may never benefit them directly. I think the ability to do this, and the empathy and sense of interconnectedness it requires, is foundational to any kind of functioning society. For example, I don't have school-aged children, but I happily vote yes on basically every bond measure and tax increase that strengthens the public school system. It's partly just caring about other people, and partly that I need new generations of literate, educated, employable people to pay into Social Security so I can retire at some point.

As far as the rest of it, it's my position that dense, well-functioning cities are good for everyone, regardless of where they live. The commerce and social interactions cities facilitate generate new ideas and innovations, cultural exports, and economic benefits that accrue to everyone to some degree whether they live in a city or not. Or, even if they live in a city and they themselves aren't for whatever reason able to take advantage of every single social and economic opportunity a city provides.

But, at least from my probably limited view, a lot of urbanist creators tend to just...not acknowledge that people in our position exist? And given that we're not that far out from a major pandemic, with some of us still keenly feeling the effects of it even if society as a whole pretends we got back to normal, and the current U.S. government seems hell bent on causing another health emergency of some variety or other...

Part of the reason I'm running with this question is because I actually think it's important and worth thinking about. I myself am not immunocompromised, but I definitely have people I care about who are either more likely to contract an illness, or more likely to suffer the most severe effects if they do. We all probably have someone in our lives who's in this position (if not ourselves), and if we're good humans we try to be accommodating when we're around them or planning social events with them.

Now, I can't tell for sure if the writer is more irked with urbanist creators, society as a whole, or the current U.S. government — I'm guessing the order is least to most — but I'll try to respond the group I'm most qualified to speak for.

The City Nerd YouTube channel was a pandemic project. I've never really talked about this, but it sprang out of more than just the fact that I had a bunch of ideas about cities and transportation that I wanted to put out into the world. 2020 was a lot for me. Thinking about what I wanted to say, writing scripts, and making those videos were my way of processing a lot of grief I was feeling during the worst of COVID-19. A lot of this is related to personal events I don't want to get into, but a lot of it was grief over losing what I can only describe as "city life." I am not an outwardly social person (perhaps obvious), but I love having my regular coffee place, my regular bar, my favorite places to eat, the happenstance meetings you have on the street as you're walking to all your neighborhood places. The pandemic took all of that away, and that was excruciating. And then even when it started coming back, it came back in compromised, antisocial ways: plexiglass barriers between you and the person you were talking to; cafe tables and transit seating arrangements that kept people far away from each other; masks that concealed the facial expressions that lend so much to human communication.

Don't get me wrong, I was on board with all these countermeasures and don't think we had much of a choice. But I also don't think we should all kid ourselves and pretend this deeply antisocial period wasn't traumatic, and that we aren't still feeling its effects today. I mean this in a deeper and broader sense, but let's bring it back to YouTube. The idea that there are people out there who, post-pandemic, will not ride mass transit, is very much embedded in a lot of my content, particularly in 2022 and 2023 when I couldn't even use the latest data from the U.S. Census or the National Transit Database because ridership fell off a cliff in 2020. For a long time I relied on 2019 data because I considered it "normal" and representative. Later, I came to accept that 2019 was a different world, and that even though transit ridership began to rebound with each successive year, it was probably never going to come back to what it was in 2019. (Nationwide, public transit is now running at about 80% of pre-pandemic levels.)

In this way, the immunocompromised, along with the people who simply developed new habits during the worst of the pandemic, are interwoven into all the stories I tell about transit — just maybe not in the way they would like!

(Side note: it's a bit ironic that the rise of urbanism as a genre of content, and really, a political force, coincided with the most anti-urban effects of the pandemic. I often wonder if the way I felt — isolated, and grieving the loss of my city — was more universal than I suspected: millions of people, suddenly, all at once, understanding all the things they treasured about city life, because they had been taken away.)

It just feels like a dereliction of duty to not acknowledge how high density spaces and public amenities/transport can potentially be high risk to those with immune issues (or in the 2020 worst case scenario, to everyone), and to address how urbanist philosophy can be strengthened with an eye towards mitigating those dangers. At least, to the extent that that's possible with just urban design and individual actions as opposed to better science education and a healthcare system that works.

Just going to be very honest with you all here, I am never going to make a video about how dangerous transit is, and how being near lots of other people is bad, actually, because it puts you at risk of catching diseases, smelling someone's poor hygiene, listening to someone's phone because that person can't afford or refuses to use earbuds, etc. To be sure, these are all valid objections to public transit as it exists today, but these arguments are made all over right wing/reactionary social media already. The way I see it, the job of pro-urban YouTube is to present a different picture of the world, hopefully a more accurate one, that has better arguments and better reflects the world most of us want to live in. To me, it would be a dereliction of my duty (inasmuch as I have one) to spend disproportionate time playing up potential downsides and edge cases, suggesting cumbersome interventions that ensure that no one is worse off (or better off), and neutering all my arguments.

That doesn't mean I'm indifferent. I hate it when people are unjustly excluded from cool things. I hate it when I'm unjustly excluded. Here's an example I live with every day. I'm gluten intolerant. If I accidentally ingest more than a trace amount of the forbidden substance, I have a gastrointestinal response that's not only completely repulsive, but probably damaging. It sucks. You know what also sucks? Here's the way the world accommodates my condition: if I'm lucky enough to find a restaurant or grocery store that offers a gluten-free version of something, I have to pay 25% more for it, and it tastes 75% worse (and I'm being generous here). I don't wish it on anybody.

I'm eternally bitter at this injustice. But never once have I proposed that, because of my circumstances, all humans everywhere should be required to eat gluten-free bagels. (What am I, a monster?) Nor have I suggested it be mandatory that all restaurants stock gluten-free sandwich bread that isn't stale and crumbly (it always is) and not upcharge me for the substitution. Instead I have to make peace with it and get on with my life. I have to spend valuable time and brain cells researching restaurants, accept that my options are limited and inferior, and know that I'm going to pay more when the check comes.

But guess what? I still enjoy going out to eat, even if I can't go all the places and eat all the things I'd like. Being in a city takes some of the sting out of that because of the sheer amount of variety on offer. Being immunocompromised is a whole other level of this dynamic, but I don't think it's unrelated: the diversity of shopping, dining, and services that are enabled by a well-functioning city is something that benefits even the people who have to avoid crowded places by necessity.

Sorry if this was a bit of a heavy question, or one that is a bit out of your normal wheelhouse. I'm not necessarily expecting a definitive answer, since I feel like it's not an easy question to give one to, but I still feel like asking for your thoughts. Because it can be tough to watch a video on the subject, agree with everything being said, but still feel like I'm being left out of the conversation by circumstances beyond my control whenever somebody touts the benefits of social interactions that are beyond my reach, or criticizes self-isolation that my partner and I can't afford to let go of.

We all have limitations we have to work with. Lots of people live paycheck to paycheck, or worse — especially in 2026. Some people have crippling social anxiety. Some people have to pay six dollars extra to order pizza on a gluten free crust that tastes like glorified hardtack. But we all have different ways we can benefit from being city people.

One of my recent posts was about the dispiriting rise of not just burrito taxis, but actual in-car dining. It wasn't meant as a dig at people for whom dining in a restaurant is a safety risk. Those people have always existed, and possibly now more than ever since we have an administration that appears intent on reviving diseases that were long ago eradicated.

I didn't like what urban life became during the pandemic. In fact, my hatred for it burned so hot that it launched me into this new, entirely different, weird career. But I also don't like the residual effects of the pandemic. Fewer people choosing transit. People spending less time meeting new people, having chance conversations, and hearing perspectives and ideas they'd never been exposed to before. More time funneled into ever more constricted algorithms that predict interests and then reinforce the most extreme and upsetting (i.e., highest engagement) ideas. More time on conversations with artificial people, engineered not to expand the intellectual palate, but to maximize flattery.

To me, urbanism is about increasing exposure and access to people, places, ideas and cultures. It's about increasing choices and opportunities. Even when we can't take advantage of all of them. (None of us can.)