Pandemics and cities: Is history a futile experiment?

01.10.2021 16:00 - 17:30 | Room 6 | SESSION

Moderator

Aslı Ceylan Öner

Assoc. Prof., Architecture, Izmir University of Economics

Ayyoob Sharifi

Assoc. Prof., Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University

Roger Keil

Prof. Dr., Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University

Ian Klaus

Senior Fellow, Global Cities, Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Tim Soens

Prof., History, University of Antwerp

Urbanization has never been this rapid, yet prone to many crises like global warming, climate change, economic inequality, infrastructure and affordable housing related issues. 2020 has introduced another layer to these crises with the COVID-19 pandemic and we have seen the "largest quarantine in human history". Maybe, this was one of the most important issues that made COVID-19 different from the previous pandemics and epidemics. Against this pandemic, the most important defense mechanism has been to provide social distancing by reducing the number of people using the city space and developing planning responses through well-maintained infrastructure of public transportation, road system as well as hygiene and sanitization. All these acts and policies aim to create more resilient cities for the pandemic. In this panel "Pandemics and cities: Is history a futile experiment?", we examine the changes that COVID-19 has brought on urban space, the lessons we learned from past pandemics as well as the know-how we can transmit to the next generations related to pandemics and urban space.