Next City: Learning from Cities during COVID-19 to Tackle Climate Change

Abstract

Fundamental principles of modern cities and urban planning are challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the advantages of large city size, high density, mass transport, free use of public space, unrestricted individual mobility in cities. These principles shaped the development of cities and metropolitan areas for more than a century, but currently, there are signs that they have turned from advantage to liability. Cities Public authorities and private organisations responded to the COVID-19 crisis with a variety of policies and business practices. These countermeasures codify a valuable experience and can offer lessons about how cities can tackle another grand challenge, this of climate change. Do the measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis represent a temporal adjustment to the current health crisis? Or do they open new ways towards a new type of urban development more effective in times of environmental and health crises? We address these questions through literature review and three case studies that review policies and practices for the transformation of city ecosystems mostly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic: (a) the central business district, (b) the transport ecosystem, and (c) the tourism–hospitality ecosystem. We assess whether the measures implemented in these ecosystems shape new policy and planning models for higher readiness of cities towards grand challenges, and how, based on this experience, cities should be organized to tackle the grand challenge of environmental sustainability and climate change.

Tourism Sustainability and COVID-19 Pandemic: Is There a Positive Side?

“…The tourism industry's stakeholders can encapsulate the environment and social protection by forming alliance strategies to recover and survive in the post-pandemic world in a more resilient and sustainable manner [69]. Moreover, a blend of scientific discovery, digital infrastructure, new regulations, and city planning can lead the cities to effectively deal with both health crises and climate change [70].…”

Smart and Resilient Urban Futures for Sustainability in the Post COVID-19 Era: A Review of Policy Responses on Urban Mobility

“…On 30 July 2020, data published by Apple Maps on searches for directions to travel by car show notable increases compared with volumes recorded on 13 January and corresponding to a 16% rise in the USA and 14% in Germany. The actual impact of COVID-19 and the future of cities post-pandemic is emerging as a popular topic among scholars from different disciplines, since intrinsic attributes of the urban system itself (high density, mass transport, free use of public space, connectivity, and unrestricted individual mobility) affect the potential success of epidemic prevention and management [3,18,19].…”

“…Others question the future use of large public spaces as spaces of civic action and foresee their rediscovery with alternative uses [30]. Although the literature is still evolving, many researchers have discussed the need for flexibility in zoning and land-use distribution [19,24], and there is also seminal work on the use of computational techniques to assess alternative post-pandemic urban planning scenarios [31].…”

“…The future of urban sustainability depends on the recovery of mass transit ridership, and the complementary use of other sustainable means in order to avoid auto-dependence, congestion, and an increase in pollution [33]. However, this challenge can only be addressed in combination with changes in city planning, and the success of this effort will reflect cities' readiness to deal with major challenges [19]. The digital transformation of the urban transport ecosystem using smart city technologies can lead to the development of network effects at the physical and digital space, but also to digital externalities that altogether strengthen the sustainability and resilience of this urban domain [64].…”

An integrated platform for managing information in smart cities

“…A range of services that includes strategy, organization, municipal informatics, business systems, architecture and infrastructure, as well as advice on what to do to provide intelligent services constitutes a key to the pandemic planning and emergency solutions that enable public authorities and municipalities to carry out thorough preparedness and response planning for major health crises [27,28]. This is how any city can develop and implement a master plan that embodies its unique vision and priorities across the various city planning departments and leverages processes such as capital improvement, budgeting, data management and analysis to create a culture of innovation, efficiency and sustainability.…”