10 ways cities progressed during the pandemic

As COVID-19 continues to disrupt urban life around the world, some cities have made transformative, and in some cases unprecedented, changes this year to improve the health, safety, and overall livability of residents.

Leaders have announced policies and initiatives to tackle problems from climate change to inequality, and have experimented with cutting-edge technology to bring cities into the future. In many cases, the social and economic consequences of the pandemic also forced cities to rethink the way they had always done things and to implement solutions that challenged the status quo.

Here are 10 ways cities – and their people – not only kept moving forward in a busy year, but also brought ingenuity and innovation to residents.

Architecture: Rethinking building ventilation

In March, Uber Technologies Inc. opened its new San Francisco headquarters, two glass-clad buildings connected by a transparent airlift. But the 180 crystals that cover much of the façade are more than just a matter of aesthetics. Designed by the innovative architecture studio SHoP Architects, they open and close automatically during the day, allowing natural air flow and temperature regulation. While the plans were first unveiled in 2015, the design addresses two of today’s most urgent crises: the pandemic and climate change. The spread of COVID-19 highlighted the need for adequate ventilation in buildings, while cities are also rethinking their dependence on heating and air conditioning.

Urban planning: the ‘one minute city’

Inspired by the concept of the “15-minute city” popularized by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, in 2020, Sweden is rethinking the design of neighborhoods street by street. An initiative called “Street Moves” drives the “one minute city” and invites local communities to become co-architects of their own street designs.

While the “15-minute city” aims to give residents access to daily essentials within walking or cycling distance of their homes, the “one-minute city” focuses on more public space. beyond the door of the house. Through consultants and workshops, residents will help decide how that space is used and what services they want to access. The concept is currently being tested in a handful of cities, including the capital Stockholm, but the Swedish government plans to bring it across the country with the goal of making all streets healthy, sustainable and vibrant by 2030.

Water: affordable vending machines

Finally, water may be more easily accessible to some residents of Nairobi’s informal settlements, where cartels sell it at grossly inflated prices. The city is in the final phase of a program to install 10 vending machines in the slums of Mukuru, where more than 600,000 people live. The stations will be token-operated (money can be loaded onto the tokens through the M-Pesa mobile money platform) and will charge as little as 50 Kenyan shillings (less than 50 cents) for enough water to fill a jerry can. Authorities have started digging wells in the main slums of the city, each of which can feed water to four dispensers.

Technology: a smart city makes its way

In Japan, Toyota will build a high-tech metropolis on an area of ​​about 70 hectares at the base of Mount Fuji. The automaker, which made its first foray into city development, began construction of the “Woven City,” or the “woven city,” in February. The plan is to turn it into a living laboratory to test how urban centers can adapt to fully autonomous transportation, with select residents expected to move after the project is completed in 2024.

A network of sensors and cameras will be used to create a “digital twin” of the living city. This virtual and synthesized data will be used to teach vehicles to safely navigate the real world without human intervention. Some experts predict that by 2040 more than 30 million autonomous vehicles could be on the road worldwide.

Public health: the United States opens its first injection centers

New York City opened the first safe injection centers in the United States on November 30. The two centers, located in the Washington Heights and Harlem neighborhoods, come at a time when the country’s drug crisis worsened during the pandemic. Overdose deaths increased 29% between April 2020 and April 2021, surpassing 100,000 cases for the first time in a 12-month period, according to federal data.

Advocates have long called for legally authorized injection sites in the United States where healthcare workers can prevent or reverse overdoses using naloxone nasal spray. They can also contact users who wish to do so with social services. But these centers remain controversial, and efforts in several cities have stalled, particularly under the Trump Administration, which threatened legal action under a federal provision aimed at banning crack houses.

Energy: the first thermosolar plant in Latin America

Last August, a US $ 1.4 billion solar thermal plant was inaugurated in the Atacama desert, in Chile, the first in Latin America. Unlike solar photovoltaic plants, the approximately 1,400-hectare Cerro Dominador complex can store the sun’s heat in molten salts to generate electricity for up to 17.5 hours, even at night. Together with a nearby photovoltaic plant, the complex can produce some 210 megawatts of renewable energy, which Chile hopes will help power the country’s electricity grid as it shifts away from coal power in its bid to become carbon neutral. by 2050. The plant could save Chile more than 600,000 tons of CO2 emissions a year, equivalent to taking 300,000 cars off the road, according to outgoing President Sebastián Piñera.

Justice: an alternative to the police

In May, Washington DC launched a six-month pilot program to divert 911 calls about behavioral emergencies from police to social workers. This initiative, along with similar ones implemented in cities such as New York, Denver or Los Angeles, aims to reduce fatal interactions between law enforcement officers and people experiencing mental health crises. They emerged amid calls for police reform following the 2020 murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

In Washington, officers were trained to screen calls that could generate violence or that involved people under the influence of drugs and alcohol. In the first phase, only about 330 calls related to mental health were diverted – 2% of all calls of this type – although the district hopes to be able to accept more cases as the program expands and more specialists are recruited. If these programs are successful, they could help pave the way for other cities to experiment with alternative policing models and begin to change the way law enforcement engages with communities.

Climate: Heads of heat

Scorching summers, rampant wildfires, massive power outages and hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths around the world each year have put extreme heat high on the climate resilience agenda of cities. This year, for the first time, cities hired “heat managers,” a person, potentially with their own team, dedicated to developing cooling interventions to protect citizens from excessive temperatures.

Jane Gilbert, who became Miami’s chief heat officer, and the first person in the world to take on that role, has been working with the city’s emergency management to better reach vulnerable and elderly populations and develop initiatives. to increase forest cover, as well as making plans to rethink the design of buildings and urban landscapes for a warmer world. The city will share best practices with a global heat resistance alliance that includes Athens, Greece and Freetown, Sierra Leone. Phoenix also recently created a heat bureau, which aims to cool the city through data-driven strategies.

Equality: social services around the corner

In a new initiative, Bogotá is installing caregivers in the center of its blocks, ensuring that the social services they need are within easy reach. About a third of the women in the Colombian capital are engaged in full-time unpaid care, including domestic work and caring for dependents. This limits their ability to enter the workforce, participate in politics, and achieve financial independence.

As part of a four-year program, introduced in late 2020, the city is creating “care blocks” to relieve women (and some men) of some of that burden. These centers bring together services – such as flexible education, women’s health care, and men’s care classes – so that they are easily accessible within a block of the neighborhood. The first “care block,” created last year, spans 800 square meters around a huge community center, and offers more than 30 programs that authorities say will benefit 50,000 residents. For people who live outside the neighborhood, the city offers buses that bring services to their doors.

Transport: Universal Basic Mobility Pilot Cities

A handful of cities in the United States are piloting universal basic mobility through initiatives that subsidize travel by bus, electric bicycles, scooters, and other forms of public and shared transportation. These cities include Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Bakersfield, California, with programs targeting low-income users.

Although the number of users on buses and trains has decreased in cities around the world over the past two years, the pandemic highlighted the need to remove barriers – such as unreliability and affordability of the service – for users. who depend on public transportation for daily activities like work and school.

Research has also shown the link between stable transportation and economic success in the United States. In Bakersfield, participants will earn passes to ride free buses and shared electric bicycles and scooters, while researchers study which means people choose for different destinations and how programs affect their financial security and quality of life and health. The results could determine if these initiatives will become permanent.