Since Covid-19 became a global health crisis, cities and citizens around the world have witnessed and experienced the urban dimension of the pandemic. Without a doubt, both the impact of the virus on urban life and the responses of cities and governments represent a turning point in how urban areas function, are managed, and will be planned.

At the same time, the socio-economic challenges brought to the fore by the pandemic compel us to rethink how we can better harness technology, innovation, and cooperation to move forward and strengthen social and urban resilience.

In this shifting moment, we at Citiestobe are focused on shedding light on the future of cities, helping all relevant stakeholders involved in city management and urban life connect the dots of the post-pandemic urban world.

For this reason, we surveyed a group of leading global urban experts from different fields — including urban science and planning, multilateral cooperation, climate change, and sustainability — about how cities will function after Covid-19.

Here is the first part of our conversation with them.

«The Covid-19 crisis has shown the strength of cities, because it is a systemic urban crisis of a sanitary nature. The fact of having to silence the city to avoid the spread of the virus shows the need to rethink our cities’ urban planning to, above all, favor the creation of economic, ecological and social value in the proximity.

We must rethink the long journeys that take place within the city to go from point A to point B and the concentrations associated to them. We need to rethink our cities’ mono-specialized focal points and give greater impetus to the polycentric city, to the multipolar and multifunctional city, making accessibility to essential local services a priority, within a maximum distance of 10 to 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle, to create this new multicenter city; what we have called in Paris 'The 15-Minute City'.»

«This is an opportunity to rethink and to redesign towards achieving equity in the city. One of the lessons from the pandemic is that marginalized groups in different contexts are the hardest hit by the disease. Here in the United States, Black Americans are dying at much higher rates than white due to the systemic racism which permeates health systems, economic safety nets and more. Right here in my state of Massachusetts, people in the town of Chelsea – mostly immigrants and people of color – are disproportionately dying. Now, Chelsea has high rates of air pollution due to industry located there and people have been connecting the dots between environmental burdens and Covid-19 deaths.

In Singapore, progress on the disease was laudable until cases rose sharply in neglected migrant dormitories. Our communities are only as resilient as our most vulnerable people, and conversely we can only survive pandemics and other crises if we think about our most vulnerable people first. We could have foreseen such vulnerabilities.

Indeed, South Korea shows an impressive example of such consideration given to marginalized groups. Trade unions, NGOs and the civil sector helped to keep the government accountable to immigrants and low-wage workers in the country, and head off any outbreaks in vulnerable communities. The question now is how can we start now to redesign our transit systems, our green spaces, our city services, our built environment and our digital city life with deep consideration of inequality. We have an opportunity to design for resilience across social groups — gender, race, immigration and so on — let’s not squander this moment.»

+ Read our interview with Catherine D'Ignazio on cities and gender

«The pandemic is having a major impact in Latin America and the Caribbean, not only from a health perspective, but also from a humanitarian point of view and with unprecedented socioeconomic consequences.

In an environment of great uncertainty about the future of activity in cities, we know that a significant number of households will fall into poverty and extreme poverty in the region (30 million and 18 million people, respectively, according to ECLAC data). We also know that developing a vaccine will take many months and that in this context, daily social and economic activities will need to be subject to follow strict biosecurity protocols – which include physical distance, isolation and avoiding crowds as behaviors that will become habits. It is also worth mentioning that we will see risk-averse behaviors from individuals at different levels.

New circumstances and features in terms of individual behaviors and valuations may facilitate the acceptance of a new way of life in the city where proximity plays a central role. And the truth is that a city of proximity, which promotes that each neighborhood can count on the infrastructure and the economic offer to satisfy the basic needs of the community, can have a positive impact in terms of reducing emissions, decongestion and optimization of time, coexistence and strengthening of social cohesion. This concept would open the way to the materialization of the ideal polycentric city. Negative circumstances, added to the unexpected effects of adaptation during the pandemic, could unexpectedly result in a new and more sustainable functioning of the city. And no one could have anticipated it.»

+ Read our interview with Elkin Velásquez on Latin American cities and inequality

«The best way to predict what’s going to happen in the future is to look at what’s already happening now: people are traveling less and polluting less. So the water is clear. The air is clear. There’s less airplanes. There’s less cars. Oil prices have plummeted. Electricity use is really down because lots of business are closed. So really, you’ve seen a drastic, drastic reduce.

And as much as this pandemic has given the environmental groups motivation and inspiration to move forward toward a new cleaner environment, we also have the polluters pushing forward to have lax regulations and to continue polluting. I predict that we are going to continue fighting back and forth – and that the pandemic has given ammunition to both sides.

The other thing that people have started to wake up to is food. The way that it is transported from the manufacturer or the grower to the final consumer has really shifted. I think that this Covid-19 pandemic is a rehearsal for climate change, where we are going to see food shortages, we are going to see hoarding. But in the same time, in my community there has been groups that have sprung up: people have been sharing food, canning food, growing their own food. I can’t tell you how many people I know who have for the first time planted a garden and started doing composting. Even apartment dwellers are planning tomatoes and planters on their on their porches. So there’s a lot of home gardeners and a lot of home sharing of food. And I think that is what’s going to start to happen as well with climate change.»

+ Read our interview with Laura Tenenbaum on cities facing climate change

«Since Covid-19 became a global health crisis, cities and citizens from all over the world have witnessed and experienced the urban dimension of the pandemic. Without a doubt, both the impact of the spread of the virus on urban life and the response to the crisis by cities and governments represent a before and after in terms of how urban areas function, are managed and will be planned.

At the same time, the socio-economic challenges brought to the fore by the pandemic force us to rethink how we can better harness technology, innovation and cooperation to move forward towards increasing social and urban resilience.» ●