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Introduction
Current coronavirus crisis teaches the society to realize the essential need for a new urban planning approach. Rewriting local regulation is not enough to provide equal sustainability. It is the radical change in the political economy that embraces an adapted urban planning system. The COVID-19 pandemics has showed that it is not only social and economical, but also a city planning problem. Hence, the immediate impact of pandemics on the cities can be reduced through the long-term problem-solving urban and regional planning.
City Planning Issues in Terms of Pandemics
While planning a city, regional planning, disaster planning, and risk management should be integrated into a unified framework. Each pandemic threatens the world economy with a recession that will mostly affect the lower socio-economic groups of society. City planning strategies during pandemics vary in different countries, relying on either substantive planning (fortifying public transport system) or urban design (closing the streets). Moreover, the urban planners have to choose whether the city has to be sealed off, designed for lockdown, or, on the contrary, be free-flowing to the maximum. Usually, when the city is affected by pandemics, local health officials advise the citizens to minimize interaction with each other and stay home. This strategy is complicated for people with stable incomes and homes and virtually impossible for homeless people. Moreover, it is inefficient when applied to unhealthy or inadequate dwellings.
City planning should initially concentrate on the services that become essential in case of the citys lockdown. During pandemics people have to reduce their travel distances, so it is important to consider the presence of healthcare clinics in each individual neighborhood. According to researches, past pandemics have repeatedly underscored, for example, the vulnerability of groups such as pregnant women and taught other lessons valuable for future preparedness. (Monto & Fukuda, 2020). The same relates to the hospitals and hospital beds, internal care units, and even the number and quality of respirators. Private hospitals should be ready to open up for those in need and public use. This strategy was one of the first reactions in the Eastern countries when the COVID-19 pandemics began (Shaw et al., 2020).
Each short-term decision in urban planning has to support strategic objectives like public health, environmental, social, and economic sustainability. The COVID-19 pandemics revealed the societys dependency on fossil fuel. Therefore, a decade-long city planning program should include the construction of a green economy and intensive investment in infrastructure. While building luxury shopping malls and housing, it is also essential to pay attention to the shelter for the homeless people and the lower-income groups (Litmann, 2020). Welfare systems should guarantee both decent employment and unemployment benefits for the whole society. An adapted city planning system also assumes integration with smart city technology for human settlements management. Smart city technology is implied with the aim of not only promoting them but also creating inter-city infrastructures and partnership building among them, which would further aid the national government in its governance. (Kummitha, 2020). In such a case, the smart city technology field requires democratization to be efficient in terms of pandemics.
Strengthening Strategies Proposal
The best strategies to incorporate resilience of public services and physical infrastructure imply:
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redundancy of infrastructure;
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development of the emergency plan;
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improvement of the communication systems;
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ability to re-prioritize rapidly in terms of pandemics;
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diversification of economic structure, allowing business activity and employment regardless of economic shocks;
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public services should be de-privatized and democratically controlled;
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annihilation of the individual financial security.
References
Kummitha, R. K. R. (2020). Smart technologies for fighting pandemics: The techno- and human-driven approaches in controlling the virus transmission. Government Information Quarterly.
Litmann, T. (2020). Pandemic-resilient community planning: Practical ways to help communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from pandemics and other economic, social and environmental shocks. Victoria Transport Policy Institute.
Monto, A. S., & Fukuda, K. (2020). Lessons from influenza pandemics of the last 100 years. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 70(5), 951957.
Shaw, R., Kim, Y., & Hua, J. (2020). Governance, technology and citizen behavior in pandemic: Lessons from COVID-19 in East Asia. Progress in Disaster Science.
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