Muriel Bowser alcanzó un protagonismo nacional este año por ser una voz destacada en la pandemia del coronavirus y el movimiento por la justicia racial. Bowser fue electa alcaldesa de Washington, DC, en 2014 y reelecta en 2018. Es una gran defensora del movimiento por otorgar categoría de estado a DC y ocupa un cargo único: es gobernadora y directora ejecutiva de condado, y también alcaldesa. Desde que asumió su cargo, ha buscado acelerar la producción de viviendas asequibles en el Distrito, que alberga a 706.000 personas en 176 kilómetros cuadrados y cuenta con un presupuesto de US$ 16.000 millones. Además, trabajó para diversificar la economía local, aumentar la satisfacción con los servicios de la ciudad e invertir en programas y políticas que apoyen a las familias. Bowser nació y creció en DC, inició su carrera política en 2004 como comisionada asesora de vecindarios para el barrio Riggs Park y en 2007 entró en el concejo del Distrito Electoral 4. Hace poco, nos cedió un tiempo de su agenda de alcaldesa de la capital de la nación para conectarse por correo electrónico con Anthony Flint, miembro sénior del Instituto Lincoln.

Anthony Flint: Asumió su cargo a principios de 2015. ¿Hubo algo que la pudo haber preparado para el 2020? ¿Cómo ve que se desarrollará lo que queda de este año turbulento? ¿Confía en la gestión ante el coronavirus?

Muriel Bowser: Como ciudad global, nos preparamos constantemente para un abanico de impactos y tensiones. Sin embargo, está claro que este es un evento inaudito que exigió una respuesta inaudita. Los residentes y las empresas hicieron sacrificios tremendos por la salud y la seguridad de la comunidad. Como Distrito, tenemos la suerte de que encaramos la crisis desde una posición de fortaleza. Eso nos permitió empezar a implementar muchos recursos de inmediato para proteger y apoyar a los residentes, como entregar alimentos para personas mayores, crear sitios de distribución gratuita de productos de almacén para quienes los necesitaran o establecer sitios de pruebas gratuitas en toda la ciudad y contratar enseguida cientos de rastreadores de contacto. Desde que comenzó la emergencia, nos hemos centrado mucho en seguir a la ciencia, oír a los expertos y mantener informada a la comunidad. Ojalá eso continúe hasta que podamos superar esto. Pero en general, estoy muy orgullosa de cómo respondió la población de Washington al desafío.

AF: ¿Qué expresa el mural de “Las vidas negras importan” sobre la calle 16th Street frente a la Casa Blanca (replicado en muchas otras ciudades) sobre la dinámica del dominio público y el cambio social?

MB: Decidí crear el Paseo “Las vidas negras importan” cuando las protestas pacíficas contra el racismo sistémico se encontraron con gas lacrimógeno, helicópteros federales y soldados camuflados ocupando nuestras calles locales. Y lo que hicimos fue crear un lugar donde la población estadounidense pudiera unirse para protestar y reparar, para crear estrategias y sanar. La población de todo el país se volcó a la calle para exigir un cambio. Ya sea mediante protestas o arte, o una combinación de protestas y arte, la gente está usando el dominio público para enviar un mensaje claro: que las vidas negras importan, que la humanidad negra importa, y que debemos saldar esta cuenta y reparar los sistemas rotos que perpetúan el racismo y la injusticia desde hace demasiado tiempo.

AF: En 2019, estableció un objetivo para 2025, de crear 36.000 unidades de vivienda nuevas (12.000 de ellas asequibles). ¿Cuáles son las cosas esenciales que deben ocurrir para crear más opciones de vivienda en Washington?

MB: Cuando asumí el cargo, llevamos a más del doble la inversión anual en el Fideicomiso para la Producción de Viviendas de DC, a US$ 100 millones al año. Es el mayor valor per cápita de todas las jurisdicciones. Y no solo estamos invirtiendo: estuvimos sacando ese dinero y poniéndolo en proyectos que producen y conservan miles de viviendas asequibles en toda nuestra ciudad. Pero debemos hacer más. Como usted destacó, en DC tenemos un objetivo grande: construir 36.000 viviendas nuevas para 2025, y que al menos un tercio de ellas sea asequible. El año pasado, nos convertimos en la primera ciudad de la nación en establecer metas de vivienda asequible por vecindario. Cuando anunciamos esas metas, también organizamos conversaciones comunitarias en vecindarios de toda la ciudad para debatir con los residentes sobre el legado persistente de las diversas prácticas discriminatorias y sobre cómo podemos trabajar en conjunto para mejorar. Algunas de las medidas que estamos tomando para lograrlo son: una reducción impositiva en zonas de alta necesidad, cambios en el programa de zonificación inclusiva y continuar con esas inversiones grandes (y estratégicas) del Fideicomiso para la Producción de Viviendas.

AF: Si la economía de la ciudad se recupera de la pandemia, es probable que Washington continúe con su historia de logros con relación al renacimiento urbano. ¿Qué políticas implementó para abordar el aburguesamiento y el desplazamiento, tanto residencial como comercial?

MB: Sé que Washington se podrá recuperar de esta pandemia. Aún tenemos más de 700.000 habitantes que tienen capacidad de recuperación y creatividad, y se centran en ayudar a sus pares a superar la situación; sobre esa base, sé que superaremos esto.

Cuando entramos en emergencia sanitaria pública, ya nos centramos mucho en construir una ciudad más inclusiva y procurar que los beneficios de nuestra prosperidad llegaran a más habitantes. Esta pandemia no hizo más que amplificar la importancia de nuestras labores por la igualdad. Y al avanzar con la respuesta y la recuperación, aún nos centramos en cómo nos acercamos a nuestras metas de vivienda, empleo, atención médica y más. Seguimos invirtiendo más de US$ 100 millones en viviendas asequibles. Estamos avanzando con nuestro plan estratégico para lograr que no haya más personas sin hogar, y abrimos refugios nuevos y más dignos en toda la ciudad. Los programas para adquirir una vivienda continúan. Observamos los números reales de las viviendas para ver cómo podemos ayudar a más residentes a quedarse y construir su futuro en DC.

Y también apoyamos a las pequeñas empresas y los emprendedores locales. Por ejemplo, hace poco anunciamos una nueva estrategia de inclusión equitativa que aumentará el acceso a oportunidades de desarrollo para organizaciones que pertenecen de forma total o mayoritaria a individuos de la población en desventaja social.

AF: ¿Qué tipo de importancia atribuye a la oficina de planificación de su ciudad, y por extensión, quién se está desempeñando bien en la práctica de planificación en otras ciudades?

MB: Es esencial no solo que planifiquemos para el crecimiento a largo plazo de DC, sino también que procuremos que el crecimiento refleje los valores de una ciudad inclusiva y dinámica. Mi Oficina de Planificación tiene un papel crucial en la promoción de nuestras metas de viviendas, y nos ayuda a construir una ciudad que trabaja para la población de todos los entornos y niveles de ingresos. Dado que la oficina de planificación puede ofrecer análisis de políticas, hacer consideraciones a largo plazo y tener un alcance comunitario, además de encargarse de las necesidades de implementación en cuanto a la zonificación y el uso territorial, para mí es uno de los organismos de la vivienda. Trabajan junto con el departamento de vivienda tradicional, la autoridad de viviendas sociales y el organismo de financiamiento de viviendas para analizar las viviendas y la capacidad de pago.

Respecto de otras ciudades, lo que es interesante es que en todo el país también están pasando muchas cosas fantásticas a nivel local, y las ciudades y los pueblos están creando soluciones innovadoras que están a la altura de sus necesidades únicas, desde Los Ángeles hasta Gary, Indiana, y Boston. Las ciudades son incubadoras de innovación, y si bien no siempre tenemos los mismos desafíos (por ejemplo, algunas ciudades tienen muchas personas y pocas viviendas, y otras tienen muchas viviendas y pocas personas), siempre estamos aprendiendo unas de otras.

AF: ¿Qué pueden hacer las ciudades ahora para enfrentar la crisis climática, que sigue avanzando, aunque en este momento esté eclipsada por las otras emergencias que estuvieron ocupando lugares más protagónicos?

MB: La justicia medioambiental debe ser parte de la conversación más amplia que tenemos a nivel nacional en este momento. Por ejemplo, sabemos que el daño causado por el cambio climático antropogénico tiene un impacto desproporcionado en las comunidades de color. Además, cuando observamos el impacto desproporcionado que la COVID-19 tiene en las personas negras estadounidenses, vemos el vínculo directo con el trabajo que debemos hacer para construir comunidades más saludables y con mayor capacidad de resistencia. Es toda una conversación sobre igualdad y justicia. En DC tenemos varios programas, como Solar for All, que se centran en combatir el cambio climático y a la vez responder a la desigualdad y otras disparidades. No debemos aislar estas problemáticas; podemos y debemos centrarnos en todo.

Fotografía: La alcaldesa Bowser observa el mural de “Las vidas negras importan” que encargó para la calle 16th Street, que lleva directo a la Casa Blanca. Crédito: Khalid Naji-Allah.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the Columbia University Press blog.

COVID-19 has presented new challenges for leaders at all levels, forcing many to reconsider their emergency management processes. What are the impacts of the current public health crisis on disaster preparedness and community planning, and what will it take to build a more equitable and resilient future? We sat down with Laurie Johnson and Robert Olshansky, authors of the Lincoln Institute book After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery and companion Policy Focus Report to discuss the pandemic and the path forward. Johnson, an internationally recognized urban planner specializing in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management, has advised local governments and others following earthquakes, landslides, floods, hurricanes, and human-made disasters around the world. Olshansky is Professor Emeritus of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and has published extensively on post-disaster recovery planning, policy for earthquake risks, hillside planning and landslide policy, and environmental impact assessment. Olshansky and Johnson also coauthored Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans, a book informed by their years on the ground after Hurricane Katrina.

Emma Zehner: What lessons from disaster recovery are most relevant to this pandemic? How is this public health emergency different from natural disasters you have dealt with in the past?

Robert Olshansky: With many disasters, we think about external factors, but the way this disaster manifests itself is in people. The threat, instead of a hurricane or earthquake, is every person we encounter, which sets up a different dynamic. The other unique aspect is the time delay and the exponential nature of the spread. These are counter to our normal cognitive processes. Masks seem to reduce the exponential factor, but the time delay is still there. So, yes, we have the ability to control things and in principal have the ability to change the trajectory of the disaster, but some of that is an illusion because the situation is so unusual.

Laurie Johnson: Yes, time is one of the four factors that governments can control. The others are money, information, and collaboration. This case is slightly different. With sudden onset disasters like earthquakes, you come to the disaster scene and begin to act. Right now, we can actually act while the pandemic disaster is unfolding and try to control how impactful it will be. This is also unusual because it is impacting all of the United States and most of the world at the same time. Historically, disaster management in the United States and many other countries has been built on the concept of mutual aid. We don’t have all of the fire trucks to fight all fires in California, so we rely on supplies from elsewhere. In the case of emergency management in the pandemic, we haven’t been as able to use these mutual aid principles. In every state and every city, supply chains have been impacted.

This has called for a different kind of collaboration. Most of the needed action is actually inaction, social distancing, which is counter to the idea of collaborative governance in the sense of empowering people to rebuild. Instead we are trying to empower people to do nothing, which is hard for leaders to get their head around.

It has also been interesting to note how public officials have defined essential services. To flatten the curve and keep people sustained, we had to consider and maintain a wider set of services than what we normally think about for natural disasters, in which essential services focuses primarily on mass care and shelter, water, and other basic infrastructure. In the pandemic, essential also included access (even if limited) to exercise and outdoor recreation, farmers’ markets and restaurant take-out services, for example.

EZ: To what extent has the pandemic prompted a questioning of standard disaster preparedness and management practices, especially spatial/territorial ones?

LJ: This pandemic has underscored the idea of local primacy in disasters and the importance of leadership at the local level. California is depending on county and city public health officials and others to really make things happen. I think it will be the same in terms of recovery. The civil protests have also pushed local leaders on how limited resources should be reallocated at the local level. So the pandemic has raised some good questions about the mutual aid management model, and reinforced the need for local primacy.

RO: It has become clear that the model of local primacy with resources from above is really the way that we need to do it. Now what is missing is a lot of the resources from above. One of those resources is technical guidance, which is the role that the CDC should play. Others include federal coordination, communication, funding to make social distancing feasible, funding to ensure that economic impacts are equitable, regulatory actions to scale up testing, and policy changes to spur production of needed supplies.

LJ: Also, during this pandemic, there is a whole structure of public health management that is not typically as dominant in natural disaster management. You have different leaders: the National Institutes of Health and the CDC, and state and local public health departments. On top of that, you have political leaders setting up their own task forces. It is definitely not as lean and efficient as when you have clear lines of authority through the emergency declaration process, but I think that a ton of learning has occurred.

EZ: Has the response to the pandemic provided new tools and ways of thinking for disaster planning? What responses do you point to as examples?

LJ: It was an aha moment for me to realize that we can be so much more deliberate in mitigating the impacts while we are in disasters that unfold with time (even wildfires and hurricanes in which the disaster event can last several days). We typically talk about resilience in terms of engineering, such as building barriers for floods, and adaptation. Those both typically happen either before disaster strikes or during the recovery stage. We don’t talk as much about resilience during the event. The decisions we make during the crisis can really affect our recovery trajectories differently. The same is true of wildfires and hurricanes, even though the event timeframe is more limited. Mass evacuation in real time can protect lives and also allow first responders to focus on managing the hazard, like firefighting, instead of evacuating people during the disaster. The evacuation process can really help set the recovery up. As we note in After Great Disasters, in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, people were evacuated all over the country, but there are things we don’t really know: How many got back and when? How many were able to establish productive and happy roots elsewhere? I now see that we do have more ways to design a good recovery in real-time with the decisions and actions we take as the disaster is unfolding. Another example is sea level rise, which has a slow onset with sudden shocks in the form of storms. We actually have ways we can mitigate the impacts of sea level rise so that those sudden shocks of storms aren’t as impactful.

RO: The pandemic has reinforced a lot of things for us, but it has also stretched our thinking a bit. It is hard to say we are doing well, but in some ways we have done a lot—such as the initial shutdown that saved our healthcare system from collapse, federal funding to lessen economic impacts, growing capabilities for testing and contact tracing, and unprecedented development of treatments and vaccines–and I think this can increase our self-confidence that we have the capacity to deal with huge events like this in the future.

LJ: In terms of notable responses, the response where I live in Marin County (California) has been very good even with some major challenges and setbacks. The county public health officials produce a video nearly every day that walks you through the decisions the county is making. Their data provides a lot of demographic and geographic details and regularly updated progress indicators give them a dashboard of information to use in determining when to back off with the next [phase of] opening. The whole process has been pretty transparent and helped people to better understand what the tradeoffs and risks are.

New Zealand, one of the countries we studied in our book, has also been very transparent. People understood where they were with that system. Their response has also been led by the national health officials and not by the formal emergency management structure. They defined different alert levels right away and set a framework of guidance and restrictions for people to follow before moving to the next level. There was clear communication from national leaders and health officials daily and restrictions on movement were strictly enforced. Perhaps it’s easier for a country that size. Nonetheless, I do believe we have much to learn from their and many other countries’ approaches.

EZ: What could we be doing better?

RO: Some of our favorite governance models are various kinds of councils and committees that were set up after these large disasters. Part of what we are missing now is transparency, communication, and explanation. Counties in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, all have dashboards of key pandemic indicators. Now they need to address how they are making policy decisions based on the data. I would like to see highly visible, explicitly defined councils at state and regional levels, so it is clear they have representation from all of the different stakeholders, are carefully listening to their views, and are making well-reasoned decisions based on multiple tradeoffs.

EZ: As we begin the COVID recovery, what can planning directors do to prepare for the next pandemic?

LJ: I am starting work on a local general plan update process now, and I think one of the things everyone has been rushing to deal with is how to work in a digital environment. How do you do both the day-to-day planning processes and the long-term planning, both of which need to involve the community? There are also big issues around equity that have been laid bare by the pandemic and we, as planners, need to understand which parts of our communities are successfully using online meeting platforms and other civic engagement tools and which are not because they don’t have access to smartphones or broadband. This is a good experience to help us strengthen and develop the tools that we need to do planning in a more expedited, online way. We are finding new efficiencies and it helps us in thinking about how we can streamline bureaucracy after disasters.

I do think some of our ongoing resilience work before the pandemic to protect against hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters is actually benefiting us right now. We have this pretty stable infrastructure that is supporting us in spite of all the demands that are being placed on the grid and on the internet in particular.

RO: Planners are very good at stakeholder involvement. In the pandemic, we need even more inclusive systems of broader stakeholder involvement, using various means of communication. We need those all the time after every disaster. Right now, I am able to attend a lot of meetings that I couldn’t attend before. We can use some of these tools that we have developed to expand the ability of a broader variety of stakeholders to communicate after all disasters. In the pandemic, all of these things have worked relatively well. In the case of an earthquake or hurricane, though, we expect to have physical infrastructure damage that can disrupt communication systems, so we need to continue to prepare to use multiple communication modes. As a result of this pandemic, we also appreciate even more the need to stay connected, and we should make sure our communications systems are going to be able to survive the earthquake and the hurricane as well.

LJ: I think planners are capable of seeing spatially and seeing systems: we are taught to think holistically. I would appeal to planners, as things come back online, to think about some of the problems that we had before this happened (congestion, traffic, etc.) and what policies we can put in place that will reduce some of those negative factors in our communities before the next disaster—but still not erode the economic and social vitality of our communities. To some extent, the civil protests are raising these questions. We don’t want to come back online without addressing the social injustice that we had long before the disaster. What did we learn during this pandemic that can be useful to this conversation? As planners, we are always studying the daily rates of this and the daily uptake of that, and we need to be providing that kind of information to the pandemic response and reopening conversations. How can we come back but reduce some of these negative daily things we know exist in our communities?

Emma Zehner is communications and publications editor at the Lincoln Institute.

Image: Map showing cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 people from September 7 to September 21, 2020. Credit: Big Local News and Pitch Interactive COVID-19 Case Mapper.

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