HEALTHY CITIES: A NEW NORMAL FOR COVID-19 ADAPTATION AND MITIGATION
By Shreya Jaiswal :
An architect and aspiring urban planner having a year long experience of
working on multidisciplinary urban projects. She is currently pursing masters
in urban and regional planning at School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal.
She looks forward to engage her knowledge into betterment of society via making
cities livable and sustainable. She is an avid writer and researcher at heart,
and holds keen interest discourses in the spectrum of urban planning-
especially in the field of ecological urbanism, socio-ecological resilience,
climate change adaptation & mitigation, healthy cities & communities
etc.
By Samragee Paul: A student of Masters in Urban & Regional Planning in the School of Planning & Architecture, Bhopal. Having lived in NCR and observing cities growing and changing from the past decades, facing problems of traffic congestion, climate change, shortage of housing and growth of slums in the neighborhoods. She has a keen interest in settlements, sustainability, communities & development. She believes, the key to bring success in any project is to involve communities in planning from the grass-rot level. Planning is for the people and by the people. She has always tried to experience fully what each aspect has to offer, not only physically, but also socially, culturally, and economically.
Ever since the recent pandemic COVID-19 began, the
things around us had a huge impact and changed unpredictably. From the economic
crisis to migration of the labor force to positive and negative effects on the
environment, the outbreak has affected the globe unprecedentedly. Researchers
and scientists across the globe are working day and night to find a vaccine for
SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, specialists
suggest, most of the symptoms are treatable, and less dangerous to human health
if early care from a healthcare specialist is provided. However, the pandemic
outbreak has prompted land-use planners to re-think about how the cities are
planned.
Today’s cities are not been able to cope up with the threats of a
pandemic as they are not designed accordingly as the case of old settlements
like Harappan and Mohenjo-Daro civilizations where they are more focused on
sanitation and grid planning. Nowadays to meet the demands of the overcrowded
population the cities are expanding in a haphazard pattern in any growth
direction extending the limits of municipal and planning boundaries. Pandemics
pose greater threats to lives, economies, and societies at large. Over the past ten decades or so, there were many deadly pandemics like
Influenza, Cholera, Dropsy, SARS, Ebola, Bird flu, Swine flu, Nipah, and now
Covid-19. The people are living in an era of pandemics,
and it has become extremely important to design the cities of tomorrow which
are safe and habitable.
Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) is the most recent pandemic that has resulted in an unprecedented social and economic impact on society (Kummitha, 2020). Though we are fighting with this pandemic the same way as we have fought with other pandemics in the past by adhering to the guidelines issued by WHO and other renowned organizations. The old saying “Prevention is better than Cure” was true then and now.
COVID-19: No nation equipped to manage
Dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic along with its unforeseen challenges has taken a substantial price from all people globally. It is being measured as the most critical worldwide health tragedy of the 21st century & the extreme challenge that people have faced after the Second World War. A new infectious respiratory disease appeared in Wuhan, Hubei province, China in December 2019 and was named as COVID-19 by WHO. According to WHO report (as of 19th September 2020), the current outbreak has affected over 30.3 million people and killed 0.9 million people in 213 countries worldwide.
