The COVID-19 virus outbreak has rocked the world and it is widely accepted that there can be no return to the pre-pandemic society of 2019. However, many suggestions for the future of society and the planet are aimed at national governments, international bodies and society in general. Drawing on a decade of research by an internationally renowned expert, this book focuses on how cities and communities can lead the way in developing recovery strategies that promote social, economic and environmental justice. It offers new thinking tools for civic leaders and activists as well as practical suggestions on how we can co-create a more inclusive post COVID-19 future for us all.

The COVID-19 pandemic was not a great ‘equaliser’, but rather an event whose impact intersected with pre-existing inequalities affecting different people, places, and geographic scales. Nowhere is this more apparent than in housing. Written by an international group of experts, this book casts light on how the virus has impacted the experience of home and housing through the lens of wider urban processes around transportation, land use, planning policy, racism, and inequality. Case studies from around the world examine issues around gentrification, housing processes, design, systems, finance and policy. Offering crucial insights for reforming cities to be more resilient to future crises, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and policy makers alike.

Our experiences of the city are dependent on our gender, race, class, age, ability, and sexual orientation. It was already clear before the pandemic that cities around the world were divided and becoming increasingly unequal. The pandemic has torn back the curtain on many of these pre-existing inequalities. Contributions to this volume engage directly with different urban communities around the world. They give voice to those who experience poverty, discrimination and marginalisation in order to put them in the front and center of planning, policy, and political debates that make and shape cities. Offering crucial insights for reforming cities to be more resilient to future crises, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and policy makers alike.

This book explores cities and intra-regional relational dynamics to challenge common representations of urban development ‘success’ and ‘failure’. It provides innovative alternative relations and development strategies that reimagine the subordinate status of secondary cities.

Why do businesses still value urban life over the suburbs or countryside? This accessible book makes the case for Face-to-Face contact, still considered crucial to many 21st century economies, and provides tools for thinking about the future of places from market towns to World Cities.

This international volume explores the transformations of public space and public transport in response to COVID-19, both those resulting from official governmental regulations and from everyday practices of urban citizens. The contributors discuss how the virus made urban inequalities clearer, and redefined public spaces in the “new normal”.

Phil Allmendinger takes a critical approach to the role of ‘smart’ in future cities and the relationship with city development. Considering how technology can support active citizenship, he challenges the commercial drivers of big tech and warns that these, not developments for ‘social good’, may dominate.

Providing an account of the policy response to COVID-19 in England, this book analyses the political and long-term systemic factors associated with the failures to control the first wave of the pandemic during 2020. It explores the part played by key policy actors, particularly politicians and scientists, and focuses on two difficult policy issues during the first wave: the establishment of a ‘test, trace and isolate’ system and responses to the high death rate in care homes for older people. Drawing on a wide range of documentary evidence, including parliamentary papers and SAGE minutes, this book draws attention to the importance of longstanding structural problems in public health and the care sector, especially the impact of outsourcing and privatisation.

This book offers a blend of moral imagination and social-political analysis to overcome the defects COVID-19 has exposed in our political-economic order. It shows how hegemony and complexity prevent societies from envisioning better practices and institutions and presents feasible solutions.

This book brings together the work of more than 25 scholars from different parts of the world who analyze the challenges posed by the new coronavirus and how it can transform the lives of the cities. Through 19 chapters organized into three sections - experiences, responses and uncertainties - the authors offer a novel perspective about the resilience of the metropolis to face the most important sanitary crisis in the twenty-first century. History shows that cities can innovate and change profoundly in a response to disasters or after suffering an intense crisis, such as a pandemic or dramatic local spread of infectious diseases. In many cases, cities evolve to better urban systems, as literature based on the resilience perspective suggests. From this perspective, this book is a unique contribution to the academic discussion offering a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the impact of COVID-19 in the cities.