Can cities bounce back better from COVID-19? Reflections from emerging post-pandemic recovery plans and trade-offs

Abstract

As cities plan for post-COVID recovery, many questions preoccupy mayors, policymakers, planners and developers. This article examines COVID-19’s impact on cities, drawing on local governments’ developing policies and responses to identify some of the emerging trends and trade-offs. Overall, city recovery will likely involve some transformation to land uses and real estate markets, with increasing demand for urban amenities and nature, and with policies in support of affordable housing, slum upgrading and informal sector employment, to achieve more liveable and inclusive cities. This in turn will depend on the policies, planning, finance, digital infrastructure and governance systems in place. While many city challenges predate COVID-19, they were exacerbated by the pandemic. The extent to which cities, and especially cities in the global South, will overcome such challenges will depend on political will and the implementation of targeted policies and low-cost investments in sustainability, liveability and inclusion.

I. Introduction

There is no doubt that cities were hit really hard by COVID-19. Besides the detrimental public health impact, cities were faced with multiple challenges. First, COVID-19 and the policies introduced by national and local governments to contain the pandemic, including lockdowns and closure of non-essential businesses, took a major toll on economic activities in cities. This was evident through the study of high-resolution satellite imagery, which showed that the intensity of nightlights – a proxy for economic activities – had considerably dimmed in cities during lockdowns and business closures.(¹⁾

On the ground, such closures meant that downtowns, central business districts and formal employment centres had largely emptied of workers, who were instructed to stay at home. With large numbers of private businesses and public facilities closing – some for extended periods and others indefinitely as they went out of business – one of the few silver linings of the pandemic has been a drastic reduction in congestion in many cities, including Cairo, Mexico City and Delhi. This in turn resulted in a temporary improvement in air quality through a reduction, estimated at 31–60 per cent, in population-weighted concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter levels.⁽²⁾

However, for the most part, the closure of businesses and disruption in formal economic activities has meant that municipal finances took a heavy toll with the decline in proceeds from sales tax and value added tax, as well as shrinking revenues from tourism and from the use of public transport and other facilities and services. According to a World Bank study of the impact of COVID-19 on municipal revenues in several cities in the global South, and interviews with mayors and senior policymakers around the world, municipal own-source revenues declined anywhere between 5 and 30 per cent in 2020.⁽³⁾

At the same time, the impact on human resources, and disruptions to supply chains, meant that service delivery systems were interrupted. The cost of delivering essential services has in some cases increased (e.g. solid waste management) while service quality and frequency has simultaneously declined (e.g. public transport, given the decline in passengers and fares). As a result of declining revenues and increasing operating costs, the remaining resources available for infrastructure investment dropped even more considerably. The city of Semarang in Indonesia, for instance, reported that its capital budget was slashed by as much as 59 per cent in the first year of the pandemic.⁽⁴⁾

The pandemic has had a particularly heavy impact on the urban poor. This was especially the case for residents in slums⁽⁵⁾ and informal settlements, whose inadequate living conditions – including overcrowded housing, an absence of private water and sanitation connections, and a lack of public spaces – meant that they were particularly prone to contagion. Similar challenges faced informal sector workers, who are estimated to number two billion globally, accounting for 61 per cent of global employment and comprise the bulk (90 per cent) of employment in the global South.⁽⁶⁾

As many as 1.6 billion informal sector workers were estimated to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic by mid-2020.⁽⁷⁾ Precarious jobs and irregular incomes meant that informal workers’ livelihoods were decimated with lockdowns and closures of economic activities. A study of informal sector workers’ conditions in 12 cities around the world found that at the peak of the lockdowns in April 2020, as many as 74 per cent of respondents could not work, and average income dropped to 21 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.⁽⁸⁾ High frequency telephone surveys carried out by the World Bank soon after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020 pointed to significant loss of employment in the short term. This affected 42 per cent of Nigerian respondents in May 2020, for instance. It also meant a massive drop in income that ranged from 55 per cent for Ethiopian respondents to over 80 per cent in Nigeria. This was coupled with severe food shortages during lockdown, as reported by 40 per cent of respondents in seven countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region.⁽⁹⁾

Moreover, as informal workers could not afford to stay at home and went out in search of work, they became disproportionately exposed to contagion risk, especially in crowded formal and informal transport systems. A World Bank study of mobility in Jakarta showed that, at the peak of the pandemic, the mobility of the richest 10 per cent of households declined 20 per cent more than that of the poorest decile.⁽¹⁰⁾ The learning and nutrition of children in poor households were as badly affected, since they lacked the infrastructure for online schooling and missed out on school meal programmes. At the pandemic’s peak, school closures affected some 1.6 billion children globally, with poor children facing the brunt of the trend.⁽¹¹⁾ Indeed, in low- and middle-income countries, the percentage of children suffering from learning poverty has risen from 53 per cent pre-COVID to 70 per cent, given the impact of school closures and the ineffectiveness of remote learning. This generation of affected students is expected to lose trillions of dollars in earnings over their lifetimes as a result of the pandemic.⁽¹²⁾ Overall, it is estimated that the pandemic will have caused an additional 97 million people to be pushed into extreme poverty in 2020, resulting in the first reversal in the trend of declining poverty globally since the financial crisis of 2008.⁽¹³⁾

II. Urban Density, Crowding and the COVID-19 Pandemic

One of the first questions to emerge after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic was whether urban density and the spread of the pandemic were linked, given that the latter first appeared in a city and then quickly spread to other urban areas. Several studies have, however, demonstrated that density was not the issue.⁽¹⁴⁾ Rather, it is the way density is managed and whether it amounts to liveable density or overcrowding. A case in point is that cities with high population densities such as Seoul and Singapore have managed throughout to contain the pandemic well, mainly because they have liveable densities and enough floor space, quality housing and infrastructure to facilitate social distancing. Cities with large populations and high densities have not necessarily fared worse than smaller and less dense cities in the same country. In China, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin – all with population densities of over 150 persons per hectare – fared much better than the smaller cities with mid-range population densities of 50–100 persons per hectare.⁽¹⁵⁾

Within the same city, neighbourhoods with higher density, such as Manhattan in New York City, have fared better than boroughs with lower density, such as Queens and the Bronx, mainly due to differences in their infrastructure quality and degree of housing overcrowding.⁽¹⁶⁾ Similarly, New York City’s borough of Manhattan, and Mumbai, which have similar population densities of 250 persons per hectare, have fared very differently. This is because Manhattan, with its higher-rise buildings, has four times Mumbai’s total floor space or built-up area. All else being equal, its residents have on average four times as much space for social distancing as their Mumbai counterparts.⁽¹⁷⁾

The pandemic laid bare the deep-rooted inequalities that exist within cities. In particular, SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was most likely to spread in slums and informal settlements, estimated to be home to about one billion people globally, in light of their built environment characteristics – inadequate basic infrastructure, especially water and sanitation; substandard and overcrowded housing; and an absence of public spaces, along with a lack of secure property tenure. For example, a study of two informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa, found that the distances between dwellings would make it very difficult to practise social distancing at the household level in order to contain virus spread.⁽¹⁸⁾ Similarly, in India, the average per capita space for the poorest 60 per cent of urban households is 72 square feet and the average per capita space for renters and slum dwellers is 42 square feet, both considerably less than the 96 square feet per capita built-up space recommended in India for its prison population.⁽¹⁹⁾

A World Bank study used artificial intelligence to predict COVID-19 hotspots in various cities based on an analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery, building heights, population density and the availability of water and sanitation infrastructure, especially public water standpipes and public toilets. The study found a strong correlation and spatial alignment between predicted COVID-19 hotspots and the geography of existing inequality within cities, namely slums and informal settlements.⁽²⁰⁾ The lack of geolocalised data on COVID-19 case incidence in cities in the developing world, with information on spatial incidence by neighbourhood, makes it difficult to confirm whether these predicted high-incidence areas are indeed those with higher documented contagion levels. One exception is a study by Malani et al.,⁽²¹⁾ which surveyed 8,870 households in slums and non-slum areas in three wards in Mumbai between 29 June and 19 July 2020. The study found a much higher level of seroprevalence in slums (54.1 per cent of surveyed households in slums versus 16.1 per cent of households in non-slum areas), indicating a strong association between the environmental characteristics and the spread of COVID-19.

Overcrowding and poor living conditions are not the only housing challenges that rose to prominence during the pandemic. The increased pressure on housing affordability in many cities around the world became equally palpable. Many households around the world started facing eviction threats as the pandemic-induced loss of jobs and income affected their ability to pay their monthly rent, mortgage or utility costs. This prompted several governments to provide relief from utility bills for the poor, coupled in some cases with moratoria on utility disconnections, including at the national level, as in the cases of Ghana, Kenya and Mozambique, and at the sub-national level in Istanbul, Turkey, where 172,000 affected households received support.⁽²²⁾ Similarly, several governments introduced temporary moratoria on evictions, including South Africa, Canada, Spain and the USA.⁽²³⁾ In some of the most expensive real estate markets globally, such those in as Singapore, Sydney, New York and London, rents for the first time either stabilised or dropped in 2020,⁽²⁴⁾ although these gains appear to have been short-lived.

III. Cities and the Post-COVID Recovery

As cities seek to recover from the impacts of COVID-19, many questions preoccupy mayors, policymakers, urban planners and real estate developers. Can cities ever recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic? And if they do indeed bounce back, what will cities look like? Will mass transit systems make it through this crisis? And what about informal transport operators? What will the future of work look like, and will downtowns and central business districts survive? Will there still be demand for high-rise, multi-family residential developments? Will the continued urbanisation process abate, or could there even be instances of reverse migration from cities to rural areas or peri-urban suburbs in search of more land, access to nature and alternative livelihoods? What about slums and informal settlements, and those working in the informal sector? This section of the article delineates some of the emerging trends of the post-pandemic city, focusing on large/primary cities in low-middle, middle- and high-income countries. The analysis draws on the author’s interactions with mayors and senior city officials and on observations of emerging trends in response and recovery plans from various cities supported by and with institutional partnerships with the World Bank.⁽²⁵⁾

Despite the many negative impacts, the likelihood is that many cities will eventually recover from COVID-19, just as they have rebounded from past epidemics such as yellow fever and cholera, pandemics like the 1918–1919 influenza and the bubonic plague, as well as from extreme weather events, earthquakes and conflicts. Those cities that have recovered have emerged stronger after past pandemics and other extreme challenges, with crises helping spur innovations in urban management, including better attention to garbage collection and sewers, planning and building codes, public health and urban planning capacity.⁽²⁶⁾

As they work their way towards recovery from the pandemic, many cities will likely come out transformed. There are some emerging instances of cities seeking to preserve or integrate nature in urban revitalisation schemes, introducing public amenities such as open spaces, parks and cultural facilities, and rethinking mobility within the city by expanding active modes (e.g. walking and cycling) at the expense of parking and road space for private vehicles, as well as encouraging the use of public transport. Similarly, there are multiple calls for an increased focus on housing quality and affordability; on expanding people’s access to basic infrastructure, especially in deprived areas such as slums and informal settlements; on supporting informal sector workers; and, overall, on making cities more inclusive and diverse. The following paragraphs detail some innovations that have occurred and that may become more widespread as cities try to identify ways to accelerate their recovery in the face of disrupted municipal finances.

a. Rethinking zoning and traditional land use and spatial planning approaches

Many cities will find themselves increasingly rethinking zoning and traditional land use and spatial planning approaches. The role of conventional office space and central business districts will begin to evolve. Surveys of real estate investors and corporations point out that a larger share of workers in the formal sector will shift towards a more hybrid work model whereby employees will combine working from home with fewer days in the office. In a study of the future of work and its impact on real estate, Ernst and Young (EY) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI) interviewed 555 respondents globally during August and September 2020, including real estate investors, developers and professionals. The study provides important insights on the evolution of real estate markets. In particular, it showed that remote work would grow to involve an estimated 60 per cent of workers spending at least 40 per cent of their time working remotely, relative to 20 per cent of workers and of their time pre-pandemic.⁽²⁷⁾ As a result, the study found, almost all (96 per cent) of the surveyed corporations were expecting to look for more flexible and customised office space, with two-thirds seeking flexible leases and over half negotiating reductions to their office footprint, as a result of the implications of remote work. Standard work tasks were largely expected to be conducted remotely, with office-based work remaining important for creativity, strategy and management tasks. This trend is expected to lead to reduced demand for conventional office space in the short run. In the long run, in cities where formal work constitutes a sizeable share of the economy, the design and retrofit of office space would increasingly prioritise more amenities and collaborative spaces and assign more office space per worker, while traditional central business districts would evolve into more vibrant neighbourhoods with mixed uses.⁽²⁸⁾ Such innovative transformations are already starting to appear. The City of London announced plans to convert empty office space into at least 1,500 new affordable housing units to create more mixed-use neighbourhoods and enhance housing affordability.⁽²⁹⁾ Since the pandemic, the conversion of old commercial buildings such as offices and hotels into residential units has accelerated considerably in several US cities, with Philadelphia and Washington, DC leading the way.⁽³⁰⁾ In fact, this is not a new phenomenon: after demand for office space dropped in the 1980s and 1990s, in 1995 New York City introduced a tax incentive scheme that enabled the conversion of some 20 million square feet of office space into apartment units in lower Manhattan, leading to a doubling of the residential population in that part of the city.⁽³¹⁾

Since major planning adjustments and deep retrofits to existing buildings are costly and time-consuming, especially in rigid, highly regulated environments, the introduction ex ante of flexible planning approaches and the design of adaptable, multipurpose buildings could gain prominence in future recovery plans. In this regard, cities with less well-established spatial planning traditions or those lacking implementation and enforcement capacity might actually not be at a disadvantage in identifying space for economic activities for affected informal workers. Several cities have started reclaiming unused public spaces and abandoned structures for such uses as neighbourhood-level farmers’ markets and pop-up retail, as in Delhi, India, or the decongestion of overcrowded public markets, as in several Ethiopian cities.⁽³²⁾ Overall, the concept of adaptive reuse of public facilities has gained much prominence during the pandemic. Empty stadiums, convention centres and community facilities were temporarily reconfigured into hospitals and mass vaccination sites in cities around the world, including Cairo, Beijing and São Paulo, while hotels affected by declining tourist demand were repurposed to serve as quarantine facilities (e.g. Manila), care homes (e.g. Buenos Aires), or homeless shelters (e.g. New York City). This logic calls for increased flexibility in design to adapt public facilities for different temporary uses during peak demand and emergencies or for permanent new uses as a result of shifting priorities or evolving needs. Practices such as adaptable design and incremental construction, which aim to accommodate limited resources, demographic change or shifting priorities, or to allow for multipurpose uses or alternative activities during peak demand, are not uncommon in Southern cities where they are often necessitated by scarce land or savings.⁽³³⁾

b. Emphasising liveability and quality of life

In cities in middle- and high-income countries, as more formal sector workers shift towards more remote and hybrid work, the traditional notion of a city where land and housing values are primarily a function of proximity to the central business district and areas of job concentrations might gradually evolve. In such instances, more emphasis could be placed on liveability and quality of life within cities. If some urban dwellers no longer prioritise living close to job centres at the expense of housing size or quality, then proximity to amenities and nature would gain more importance as features of housing market searches. In such instances, quality of life would gain in importance as a draw factor to attract and retain people in cities, especially skilled workers. Such quality-of-life amenities include strong educational institutions (e.g. universities, primary and secondary schools), restaurants, cultural facilities (e.g. museums, libraries and opera houses), and a pleasing built environment (e.g. with well-designed buildings, an urban character, open spaces and so on). Along the same lines, nature would also gain importance as a differentiating factor in people’s decision on where to live. Parks, green areas, urban forests, lakes, flora and fauna would not only make cities more attractive and liveable but would also have major environmental and health benefits. Among other gains these benefits could include adding shade and reducing urban heat island effects, retaining stormwater, attenuating the impacts of flooding and reducing air pollution.

As part of their post-COVID recovery, several cities have increasingly prioritised investments to improve liveability and preserve nature and biodiversity. Freetown, Sierra Leone, embarked in 2020 on a campaign to plant one million trees over a three-year period, with the significant increase in tree cover expected to provide shade and reduce heat effect, to serve as a carbon sink, and to help reduce soil erosion. Towards this end, the Freetown city council contracted hundreds of poor households to plant and monitor the trees’ growth, thus supporting livelihoods affected by the pandemic.⁽³⁴⁾ The city of Tirana, Albania, launched several ambitious urban regeneration projects to retrofit neglected public spaces and abandoned public buildings into attractive new spaces and cultural facilities, while also providing a stimulus to the affected construction sector. These projects include the adaptive reuse of a pyramid-shaped monument erected for a former dictator, since lying disused, which is now being converted into a cultural hub for the city.⁽³⁵⁾

The challenge is different for cities with substantial informal employment, which is the large majority of cities in the developing world. By nature, informal jobs – whether domestic work, street vending, waste collection or home-based enterprises – do not lend themselves easily to such changes of routine as working from home or interfacing remotely with employers, customers, suppliers or markets. The undocumented nature of their employment, absence of ID papers, and lack of registration with local or national authorities shut informal sector workers off from most government support measures, including relief funds to support micro, small and medium enterprises. In Accra, Ghana, only one in eight market vendors who applied for government support reported receiving funds, while none of the street vendors did due to the lack of a tax ID.⁽³⁶⁾ In a few cases, existing social safety nets at the national level have managed to reach the urban poor and vulnerable households, including Brazil’s Bolsa Familia programme, Egypt’s Takaful and Karama, and Mexico’s Oportunidades. This, however, was more the exception than the norm, and in the case of Brazil, the support provided was about one-third of that offered by the government’s emergency COVID relief support (the latter of which expired at the end of 2020).⁽³⁷⁾

In addressing the dire situation affecting hundreds of millions of workers in Southern cities, the key is to provide targeted support measures to improve informal workers’ precarious work conditions and to mitigate against financial shocks. In Colombia, informal waste pickers active in recycling in the various cities received the designation of “essential workers” through National Decree 457 of 2020, following Bogotá’s lead. This allowed these workers to continue working during lockdowns with better sanitary conditions, including access to personal protective equipment.⁽³⁸⁾ Elsewhere, the city of Durban, South Africa, is providing relief for market vendors from paying rental fees until the end of 2022.⁽³⁹⁾

c. Rethinking mobility

As part of their growing emphasis on liveability, some cities are radically rethinking mobility to tackle congestion and pollution problems. Several large cities, mainly in middle- and high-income countries, realised the benefits from lockdowns in terms of reduced traffic and improved air quality and sought to capitalise on these gains by decoupling urbanisation and economic growth from increased motorisation. Needing to provide safe mobility and facilitate social distancing, and at the same time witnessing a drop in demand for public transportation infrastructure, several cities introduced temporary bicycle lanes and expanded pavements at the expense of road and parking space. Many cities later made these improvements permanent. For instance, Bogotá, Colombia, created 84 kilometres (km) of bicycle lanes in March 2020, initially as an emergency measure to facilitate the movement of essential workers and later as a permanent change. This is the first instalment of Bogotá’s plan to add 280 km of bicycle lanes, equivalent to 50 per cent of the pre-pandemic network of 550 km.⁽⁴⁰⁾ The city of Medellín, Colombia, embarked on a similar three-year expansion of its bicycle network to 145 km, in addition to providing 50,000 electric bikes for low-cost rental, to encourage active mobility.⁽⁴¹⁾ The Italian cities of Milan and Rome also introduced temporary bike lanes at the expense of road space. At a cost of €4,000–5,000 per linear kilometre, such investments proved to be very cost-effective in improving mobility and safety in the context of the pandemic, while also contributing to reducing air pollution.⁽⁴²⁾ In the Philippines, the national government financed 500 km of bicycle lanes in three of the largest metropolitan areas – Manila, Cebu and Davao – in response to a drastic increase in user preferences for cycling post-pandemic.⁽⁴³⁾ Similarly, many cities have widened pavements to allow for safe, socially distanced walking and for outdoor seating for restaurants, including Buenos Aires, Auckland (the first city to finance pavement widening and pop-up bicycle lanes), Milan, and several US cities including Brookline, MA, New York City and Washington, DC.⁽⁴⁴⁾

The city of Barcelona, Spain, pedestrianised several streets in its historic city centre, turning the iconic gridded urban fabric into superblocks, and converting the reclaimed streets into public spaces and small pocket parks to increase neighbourhood amenities.⁽⁴⁵⁾ At a larger scale, the mayor of Paris, France, devised a plan to transform much of the city’s iconic Champs-Élysées avenue into green areas for pedestrian use.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Investments to strengthen public transportation systems and make them more comfortable, less congested and safer are also being programmed by several cities, including Buenos Aires, Shanghai and Seoul,⁽⁴⁷⁾ although questions around the financial viability of transit systems remain a particular threat for many cities.

In innovating and rethinking mobility in their cities, the mayors of Paris and Milan have announced the introduction of the 15-minute city concept.⁽⁴⁸⁾ In this approach, a household’s day-to-day necessities in the city – including work, shopping, leisure and basic educational and health facilities – would all be located within 15 minutes of home. This would occur through more flexible planning and building regulations that allow for mixed uses, together with investment in walking and cycling infrastructure, public transport and incentives for urban regeneration. This approach is intended to reduce unnecessary commutes, which would in turn decrease air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. It is worth noting that the 15-minute city concept is not without critics, as it is feared that it would curtail the city’s main advantage of agglomeration and the facilitation of access to a large number of job opportunities.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Similarly, if the 15-minute city concept is not accompanied by strong affordable housing and social inclusion policies, it could ultimately exacerbate social and economic segregation in cities, especially if rigidities in the housing market and high transaction costs severely restrict residential mobility and leave poor people indefinitely stuck in poor neighbourhoods.

In many cities with important existing deficits in terms of road and public transport infrastructure, walking and cycling represent the dominant modes of mobility. For instance, in Nairobi, 43 per cent of the population walk or cycle to their destinations and another 28 per cent take informal public transport known as the matatu. As a result of poor public transport infrastructure and dysfunctional spatial planning, most residents are unable to plug into the city’s labour market; indeed, those who walk and those who use the matatus can only access 7 per cent and 24 per cent respectively of jobs in the city in one commuting hour.⁽⁵⁰⁾

In this regard, for cities like Nairobi with infrastructure deficits, improvements to walking and cycling conditions might be necessary to address the day-to-day needs of most residents but are clearly not sufficient in themselves to fully enable access to jobs and services and the benefits from the agglomeration economies of cities. In such cities, it is important to continue investing in public transportation infrastructure. It is also critical to support informal transport operators who provide the backbone for mobility in many Southern cities. In Nairobi and Mexico City, for instance, after the government had shut down or reduced public transport infrastructure during lockdowns, the informal sector stepped in to fill the gap.⁽⁵¹⁾ Informal operators also took steps to improve operational safety by introducing contactless fares in Nairobi and making vehicles safer in Manila and several Indian cities, while also sharing routes in Mexico City in response to declining demand and income.⁽⁵²⁾ Measures to support informal transport operators during crises such as the pandemic could include issuing subsidies to drivers and providing temporary relief through moratoria on loan repayments, as was done in the Philippines.⁽⁵³⁾ In the long run, including informal operators in recovery plans and integrating them as part of the overall municipal transportation system in cities is critical, whether through formalisation or the use of complementary routes or a trunk-feeder system, with fare integration. Such approaches were used in several Latin American cities including Bogotá (the Transmilenio bus rapid transit system and later the Integrated Public Transport System), Cali, São Paulo, Quito and Mexico City.⁽⁵⁴⁾

d. Improving living conditions in slums and informal settlements

In light of the deep-rooted inequalities revealed by the pandemic in cities, some national and local governments have started paying more attention to improving living conditions in slums and informal settlements for the benefit of poor and marginalised groups. By prioritising improved access to basic infrastructure, especially water and sanitation connections, and quality shelter through retrofit of substandard housing conditions, cities aim to tackle the dual challenges of curbing the spread of pandemics and mitigating the impacts of disasters from natural hazards and extreme weather events, which have a particularly detrimental impact on the poor. Buenos Aires, Argentina, is one of several cities whose COVID-19 response has included paying particular attention to vulnerable populations in slums through enhancing basic infrastructure and services, including the provision of free Wi-Fi hotspots, coupled with the distribution of technological equipment, printed educational material and meals to support the continuity of children’s education.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Several cities, including Lima, Peru, have focused on ensuring water supply is available and uninterrupted to vulnerable populations;⁽⁵⁶⁾ other cities, including Nairobi, Kenya and Kigali, Rwanda, have significantly increased handwashing facilities in slums and informal settlements to enhance hygiene.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Similarly, the Mexico City government has set up a US $1 billion programme for housing improvement and the provision of new social housing as part of its post-COVID recovery plan, aiming both to enhance housing affordability and stimulate the construction sector.⁽⁵⁸⁾ At the national level, the Colombian and Indonesian governments have set up programmes to scale up the retrofitting of poor housing to strengthen resilience and liveability, shifting from earlier housing policies that prioritised new construction.⁽⁵⁹⁾

In addition, several governments have allocated funding for labour-intensive public works to support poor households and informal workers whose livelihoods were disrupted by the pandemic. For instance, the World Bank-supported Kenya Informal Settlements Improvement Program financed a scheme entitled Kazi Mtaani which, in its first three months of operation, created 26,000 employment opportunities in cleaning, disinfection and drainage clearance for the benefit of Nairobi slum dwellers.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Similarly, the World Bank-supported Indonesia National Slum Upgrading Program redeployed resources to support 1,000 slum communities by financing over two million workdays during 2020, leading to improvements in health, sanitation and community infrastructure.⁽⁶¹⁾ In India, less than a month after lockdowns were instituted, the Government of Odisha launched a well-conceived Urban Wage Employment Initiative, to support migrant and informal labourers through labour-intensive public works, leading the national government to request other state governments to follow suit.⁽⁶²⁾ In many places where government action was found wanting, communities such as slum dweller federations and resident associations mobilised to deliver services and support for their members.⁽⁶³⁾

e. Improving inclusion and diversity

As with liveability, inclusion and diversity would be expected to gain ground in terms of the functioning and competitiveness of cities. For large agglomerations in middle- and high-income countries, maintaining their ability to attract investments and firms means they must be able to efficiently deliver quality services and foster innovation. This, in turn, requires that they be able to attract and retain both essential workers and creative talent. Fast-growing cities with a high demand for housing but with limited affordable stock face a serious challenge in retaining essential workers such as nurses, police and security professionals, bus drivers, garbage collection staff and restaurant and cafe workers, without whom cities cannot function. Similarly, cultural and creative professionals in the arts, design, music and film industries, who are critical in making cities vibrant and attractive places, often operate within the gig economy or the informal sector, and thus cannot afford expensive housing and work studios.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Cities like Brussels, Berlin and Lisbon have been able to maintain a thriving cultural and creative scene because of their relatively affordable housing options, although high demand is increasingly putting pressure on these affordable housing markets. On the other hand, cities where housing affordability is a chronic issue, like New York and London, are embarking on plans to create affordable housing for artists to stem the exodus of creative talent.⁽⁶⁵⁾ San Diego’s housing affordability crisis has intensified to the point that barely 27 per cent of its population can afford the median home.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Ultimately, the shortage of affordable housing options will force essential workers to live much further from job opportunities. This will eventually mean essential jobs are difficult to fill, and will simultaneously bid up wages, thus eroding the competitiveness of these cities. Clearly, the affordability challenge long predates COVID-19 in cities with high demand for housing but limited new supply. Yet, the pandemic has shed a new light on these issues and in some cases has created the momentum to tackle such challenges.

Overall, two most promising innovations that could shape the post-pandemic city are the rethinking of planning and real estate markets to create more liveable places, and the promotion of inclusion and diversity. As noted earlier, several cities are increasingly reallocating real estate from road space and car parking to wider pavements, pedestrianised roads, bicycle lanes and more public spaces to promote active mobility and better quality of life. In a few cases, city authorities and developers are also planning to convert typical office space into more attractive workplaces in mixed-use neighbourhoods and with a greater supply of affordable housing.

Perhaps the main unknown variable is how the question of density will play out in cities, especially the trade-off between the benefits of urbanisation and its externalities. Well-managed urbanisation can mean high but liveable densities with agglomeration effects, more productivity, knowledge spillovers, specialised services, public amenities and economies of scale in service delivery. Poorly managed urbanisation means high density turns into overcrowding, with the potential for congestion, pollution, crime and violence and a lack of affordable housing. Whether we have high-density, compact cities or low-density sprawl will depend on the planning priorities for the city of tomorrow. On the one hand, the imperative for bold action on climate change mitigation calls for more compact cities that replace car dependency with efficient public transport and active mobility. On the other hand, demand for single-family homes and suburban living may grow as households opt for more space post-pandemic.

IV. Conclusion

a. The enablers of the post-COVID city recovery

As cities identify their pathways for emerging from the pandemic, the extent of their recovery will hinge on five key enablers. These are:

• Policies: Most importantly, enabling cities to attract diverse residents and become more inclusive requires policies to foster local economic development, enable better access to affordable housing, promote the freedom of cultural expression, mainstream universal accessibility and respond to the needs of marginalised groups. Similarly, the creation of trust between communities and local governments requires policies for citizen engagement in the planning process and in participatory budgeting to identify investment priorities.

• Planning: Achieving green, inclusive, resilient and sustainable urban development means adopting a flexible planning process that is responsive to the needs of households and firms, spatially integrated across sectors, with adaptable regulations to enable mixed-use low-carbon development and the conservation of urban biodiversity and integration of nature within cities.

• Finance: Enabling bolder action on climate change and post-pandemic recovery will require cities to tap into diversified funding sources, including a greater degree of domestic resource mobilisation, better leveraging of municipal real estate assets, as well as capturing part of the land value appreciation related to urbanisation, towards financing needed infrastructure improvements.

• Digital infrastructure: Strengthening cities’ digital infrastructure will be key to facilitating the growing trend towards remote work, together with further promoting citizen engagement and facilitating streamlined e-government service delivery.

• Governance: To make these enablers work, and to achieve the desired result of a liveable and inclusive post-pandemic city, cities need effective and transparent governance systems to underpin the efforts of elected mayors and local councils, including results measurement and reporting systems, regular communication with citizens and accountability mechanisms. This will be critical for service delivery, and especially for the quality of healthcare and emergency response systems, whose importance was underlined by the pandemic.

These enablers cannot be taken for granted in many cities in the South, given limited capacity and resources. Yet, there are instances of innovative policies, planning, finance and governance mechanisms and disruptive technologies that have taken place in many Southern cities in recent years which point to the way forward. These include citizen engagement through participatory budgeting, for instance in the Brazilian municipalities of Porto Alegre and Santo Andre, among thousands of others globally;⁽⁶⁷⁾ land readjustment and town planning schemes in the interests of efficient, well-managed urbanisation processes, as implemented in Seoul and Ahmedabad; land value capture schemes, as in Bogotá, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; transparent measurement and reporting of the results of local government performance, as in Bogotá’s Como Vamos programme; and several examples of the use of digital infrastructure to implement urban safety nets and provide financial inclusion for the urban poor, such as M-Pesa in Kenya.

Ultimately, cities will eventually recover from the pandemic in the same way that they have emerged from earlier crises. Whether cities can bounce back stronger, however, will depend on the policies, planning, finance, digital infrastructure and, most importantly, governance systems in place. Future generations will judge the effectiveness of cities’ post-pandemic recovery by the extent to which it tackles inequalities and contributes bold action against the impacts of climate change and contributes to green, resilient, inclusive and sustainable development.