"Pandemic Urbanism": Game Changer for Urban Resilience and Sustainability?
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Urban and Rural Development".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2021) | Viewed by 6686
Special Issue Editors
Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC), Urban Resilience Research Net (URNet), Carrer de la Immaculada 22 - 08017 Barcelona (Spain)
Interests: Climate Resilience, Urban Resilience Governance, Community Resilience, Urban Sustainability Transition
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: Climate Resilience, Urban Resilience Governance, Community Resilience, Urban Sustainability Transition
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Architecture, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul 03063, Republic of Korea
Interests: sustainable architecture and urbanism; integrated design; resource efficiency; urban resilience; climate adaptation; mitigation of climate change; zero emission buildings and districts; water sensitive urban design and planning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: sustainable architecture and urbanism; integrated design; resource efficiency; urban resilience; climate adaptation; mitigation of climate change; zero emission buildings and districts; water sensitive urban design and planning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
As a result of the temporary, although significant, changes in urban life that are being caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, urban adaptive strategies have been never so relevant in contributing to, and questioning, resilience and sustainability debates.
The drastic measures that have been implemented by governments to contain the COVID-19 virus infections rate, and relative contingency plans and rescue funds to resist economic and social collapse, encompass diverging but coexisting resilience perspectives: from “resilience resistance” to changes (Shamsuddin, 2020) to its opposite, the “evolutionary resilience”, promoting innovation and embracing urban sustainability transformations (Elmqvist et al., 2019). This tension, between the agreed urgency to change and the resistance to implement it, was already on top of regional and urban agenda just before the COVID19 pandemic hit, when hundreds of declarations of climate emergency pushed for radical sustainability transformation of cities and economies. However, notwithstanding these calls toward a “Climate Urbanism” (Rice and Long, 2019), based on drastic reduction of emissions aligned with equitable adaptations (Shi et al., 2016), little effort was seen in practices implementation of more sustainable and just urban future.
The Covid-19 crisis put on hold climate emergency debates and exacerbating socio-economic inequalities, while emphasizing the urgency of reinforcing public health within the design and management of cities. However, while national lock-downs are indeed targeting the single purpose of decreasing the exposure and thus vulnerability of societies to the virus, this is simultaneously resulting in a complex mix of positive and negative resilience trade-offs (Chelleri et al., 2015). The resilience “of what to what”, “for whom” and “where” (Meerow and Newell, 2019) are emerging as critical and practical questions to be urgently answered today, in a crucial moment of experimentation, adaptation, and change facing the COVID-19 pandemic recovery.
Effective and equitable urban sustainability transitions and resilience, whether to pandemics, disasters, or the climate emergency, are inter-related, and need to overcome the current misalignment among different but coexisting approaches emanating in an uncoordinated way from disparate disciplines. With a once-in-a-century impact on – and opportunity to transform – global and local economies, institutions, mobility, communications, social interactions, and the utilization of public and private spaces, only to name a few, we invite responses to the question raised by this special issue:
Should we conceive and develop a new paradigm for urban planning, associated with the emerging idea of a “pandemic urbanism”?
The biggest evolutionary steps in our cities history have been made through, and thanks to, pandemic crises. Thus, which are our learnings from this pandemic? How a “pandemic urbanism” should be framed and implemented addressing the urban resilience implementation challenge for the 21rst Century (Coaffee et al., 2018) and the recently proposed framework for a “Climate Urbanism” (Long and Rice, 2019)?
Could pandemic urbanism be a game-changer for targeting locally-led sustainable and resilient urban transformations, so urgently needed today, during COVID-19 or any future pandemic? If so, how and why, and what should be done? Might it be that continual adaptive capacity built into planning, design, and management simultaneously address the interlinked stressors of the 21st century – pandemics, disasters, and climate change?
The latest contributions from scholars started to explore the causes of the spread of the virus, associating this with the rampant urban development and incursions into formerly pristine habitats (Vidal, 2020; Smith et al., 2014), or how cities should adapt from now on public spaces (Honey-Roses et al., 2020), mobility, while strengthening people daily contact with nature, to cope with lock-downs (Samuelsson et al., 2020).
We invite scholars from all fields to contribute to above mentioned broad research questions with reviews, case studies, original empirical research, and essays; especially ones that are inter- and cross-disciplinary.
We welcome contributions which problematize the un-critical and un-political assumptions of current urban policy frameworks (i.e. New Urban Agenda, UN SDG, among others). We note that the modern origins of urban planning in Europe and the US – radical transformations in their time – were brought about by responses to epidemics and pandemics such as malaria and cholera. Then as now, they resulted from intense cooperation of the public health, urban planning and related professions, aligning their goals and perspectives.
References
Chelleri, L., Waters, J.J., Olazabal, M. and Minucci, G. 2015. “Resilience Trade-Offs: Addressing Multiple Scales and Temporal Aspects of Urban Resilience.” Environment and Urbanization 27 (1): 181–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247814550780.
Coaffee, J., Marie-Christine Therrien, Lorenzo Chelleri, Daniel Henstra, Daniel P. Aldrich, Carrie L. Mitchell, Sasha Tsenkova, Éric Rigaud, and the participants. 2018. “Urban Resilience Implementation: A Policy Challenge and Research Agenda for the 21st Century.” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 26 (3): 403–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5973.12233.
Elmqvist, T. Andersson, E., Frantzeskaki, N., McPhearson, T., Olsson, P., Gaffney, O., Takeuchi K., and Folke. C. 2019. “Sustainability and Resilience for Transformation in the Urban Century.” Nature Sustainability 2 (4): 267–73. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0250-1.
Honey-Roses, Jordi, Isabelle Anguelovski, Josep Bohigas, Vincent Chireh, Carolyn Daher, Cecil Konijnendijk, Jill Litt, et al. 2020. “The Impact of COVID-19 on Public Space: A Review of the Emerging Questions.” OSF Preprints. April 21. doi:10.31219/osf.io/rf7xa
Long, J. and Rice. J.L.; 2019. “From Sustainable Urbanism to Climate Urbanism.” Urban Studies 56 (5): 992–1008. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018770846.
Samuelsson, K., Barthel, S., Colding, J., Macassa, G., & Giusti, M. (2020, April 17). Urban nature as a source of resilience during social distancing amidst the coronavirus pandemic. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/3wx5
Shamsuddin, S. 2020. “Resilience Resistance: The Challenges and Implications of Urban Resilience Implementation.” Cities 103 (August): 102763. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102763.
Shi, L, Chu, E., Anguelovski, I., Aylett, A., Debats, J., Goh, K., Schenk, T. et al. 2016. “Roadmap towards Justice in Urban Climate Adaptation Research.” Nature Clim. Change 6 (2): 131–37. doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2841.
Smith, K., Goldberg, M., Rosenthal, S., Carlson, L., Chen, J., Chen, C., & Ramachandran, S. (2014) Global rise in human infectious disease outbreaks Journal of the Royal Society. Interface. 1120140950 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0950
Vidal, J. (2020). Tip of the iceberg: is our destruction of nature repsonsible for Covid-19? The Guardian, March 18 www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/18/tip-of-the-iceberg-is-our-destruction-of-nature-responsible-for-covid-19-aoe?fbclid=IwAR1y1rR3Uoawbzyj1e_1a6HdQ-7GX-X8kDvd9f4VwAu-Wam8tIN7kuFLyKc
Meerow, S., & Newell, J. P. (2019). Urban resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why?. Urban Geography, 40(3), 309-329.
The drastic measures that have been implemented by governments to contain the COVID-19 virus infections rate, and relative contingency plans and rescue funds to resist economic and social collapse, encompass diverging but coexisting resilience perspectives: from “resilience resistance” to changes (Shamsuddin, 2020) to its opposite, the “evolutionary resilience”, promoting innovation and embracing urban sustainability transformations (Elmqvist et al., 2019). This tension, between the agreed urgency to change and the resistance to implement it, was already on top of regional and urban agenda just before the COVID19 pandemic hit, when hundreds of declarations of climate emergency pushed for radical sustainability transformation of cities and economies. However, notwithstanding these calls toward a “Climate Urbanism” (Rice and Long, 2019), based on drastic reduction of emissions aligned with equitable adaptations (Shi et al., 2016), little effort was seen in practices implementation of more sustainable and just urban future.
The Covid-19 crisis put on hold climate emergency debates and exacerbating socio-economic inequalities, while emphasizing the urgency of reinforcing public health within the design and management of cities. However, while national lock-downs are indeed targeting the single purpose of decreasing the exposure and thus vulnerability of societies to the virus, this is simultaneously resulting in a complex mix of positive and negative resilience trade-offs (Chelleri et al., 2015). The resilience “of what to what”, “for whom” and “where” (Meerow and Newell, 2019) are emerging as critical and practical questions to be urgently answered today, in a crucial moment of experimentation, adaptation, and change facing the COVID-19 pandemic recovery.
Effective and equitable urban sustainability transitions and resilience, whether to pandemics, disasters, or the climate emergency, are inter-related, and need to overcome the current misalignment among different but coexisting approaches emanating in an uncoordinated way from disparate disciplines. With a once-in-a-century impact on – and opportunity to transform – global and local economies, institutions, mobility, communications, social interactions, and the utilization of public and private spaces, only to name a few, we invite responses to the question raised by this special issue:
Should we conceive and develop a new paradigm for urban planning, associated with the emerging idea of a “pandemic urbanism”?
The biggest evolutionary steps in our cities history have been made through, and thanks to, pandemic crises. Thus, which are our learnings from this pandemic? How a “pandemic urbanism” should be framed and implemented addressing the urban resilience implementation challenge for the 21rst Century (Coaffee et al., 2018) and the recently proposed framework for a “Climate Urbanism” (Long and Rice, 2019)?
Could pandemic urbanism be a game-changer for targeting locally-led sustainable and resilient urban transformations, so urgently needed today, during COVID-19 or any future pandemic? If so, how and why, and what should be done? Might it be that continual adaptive capacity built into planning, design, and management simultaneously address the interlinked stressors of the 21st century – pandemics, disasters, and climate change?
The latest contributions from scholars started to explore the causes of the spread of the virus, associating this with the rampant urban development and incursions into formerly pristine habitats (Vidal, 2020; Smith et al., 2014), or how cities should adapt from now on public spaces (Honey-Roses et al., 2020), mobility, while strengthening people daily contact with nature, to cope with lock-downs (Samuelsson et al., 2020).
We invite scholars from all fields to contribute to above mentioned broad research questions with reviews, case studies, original empirical research, and essays; especially ones that are inter- and cross-disciplinary.
We welcome contributions which problematize the un-critical and un-political assumptions of current urban policy frameworks (i.e. New Urban Agenda, UN SDG, among others). We note that the modern origins of urban planning in Europe and the US – radical transformations in their time – were brought about by responses to epidemics and pandemics such as malaria and cholera. Then as now, they resulted from intense cooperation of the public health, urban planning and related professions, aligning their goals and perspectives.
References
Chelleri, L., Waters, J.J., Olazabal, M. and Minucci, G. 2015. “Resilience Trade-Offs: Addressing Multiple Scales and Temporal Aspects of Urban Resilience.” Environment and Urbanization 27 (1): 181–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247814550780.
Coaffee, J., Marie-Christine Therrien, Lorenzo Chelleri, Daniel Henstra, Daniel P. Aldrich, Carrie L. Mitchell, Sasha Tsenkova, Éric Rigaud, and the participants. 2018. “Urban Resilience Implementation: A Policy Challenge and Research Agenda for the 21st Century.” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 26 (3): 403–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5973.12233.
Elmqvist, T. Andersson, E., Frantzeskaki, N., McPhearson, T., Olsson, P., Gaffney, O., Takeuchi K., and Folke. C. 2019. “Sustainability and Resilience for Transformation in the Urban Century.” Nature Sustainability 2 (4): 267–73. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0250-1.
Honey-Roses, Jordi, Isabelle Anguelovski, Josep Bohigas, Vincent Chireh, Carolyn Daher, Cecil Konijnendijk, Jill Litt, et al. 2020. “The Impact of COVID-19 on Public Space: A Review of the Emerging Questions.” OSF Preprints. April 21. doi:10.31219/osf.io/rf7xa
Long, J. and Rice. J.L.; 2019. “From Sustainable Urbanism to Climate Urbanism.” Urban Studies 56 (5): 992–1008. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018770846.
Samuelsson, K., Barthel, S., Colding, J., Macassa, G., & Giusti, M. (2020, April 17). Urban nature as a source of resilience during social distancing amidst the coronavirus pandemic. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/3wx5
Shamsuddin, S. 2020. “Resilience Resistance: The Challenges and Implications of Urban Resilience Implementation.” Cities 103 (August): 102763. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102763.
Shi, L, Chu, E., Anguelovski, I., Aylett, A., Debats, J., Goh, K., Schenk, T. et al. 2016. “Roadmap towards Justice in Urban Climate Adaptation Research.” Nature Clim. Change 6 (2): 131–37. doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2841.
Smith, K., Goldberg, M., Rosenthal, S., Carlson, L., Chen, J., Chen, C., & Ramachandran, S. (2014) Global rise in human infectious disease outbreaks Journal of the Royal Society. Interface. 1120140950 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0950
Vidal, J. (2020). Tip of the iceberg: is our destruction of nature repsonsible for Covid-19? The Guardian, March 18 www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/18/tip-of-the-iceberg-is-our-destruction-of-nature-responsible-for-covid-19-aoe?fbclid=IwAR1y1rR3Uoawbzyj1e_1a6HdQ-7GX-X8kDvd9f4VwAu-Wam8tIN7kuFLyKc
Meerow, S., & Newell, J. P. (2019). Urban resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why?. Urban Geography, 40(3), 309-329.
Keywords
- pandemic urbanism
- urban resilience
- urban sustainability
- public health
- liveable cities
- urban transformation
- climate urbanism
- resilience trade-offs
- climate change mitigation and adaptation
- social justice
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