Will cities ever be the same?

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 25 December 2020

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This year has seen our cities coming under pressure as they struggled to withstand the impact of the coronavirus. City centres were deserted as shops shut and people stayed away. But in some city streets there was a new community spirit as people faced the pandemic together and supported neighbours they'd never met before. In this programme, Tamasin Ford investigates what the future could be for our cities, and asks how they need to change if they are to survive, and even flourish. We hear from architect Siri Zanelli; the mayor of Bristol in the south-west of England, Marvin Rees; transport planner Susan Claris; Singapore-based Lauren Sorkin, the head of the Resilient Cities network; Liu Qian of Greenpeace in Beijing, and Rosamund Kissi-Debrah who has been a campaigner for better air quality since the death of her daughter from asthma in 2013.

(Image: Mumbai skyline in lockdown March 2020. Getty Images.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	2020. There are few words to describe the horror this year has unleashed on us.
0:11.7	Coronavirus has exposed the fragility of our lives, of our communities and of our cities,
0:18.9	the epicentre of this pandemic.
0:21.3	My concern is that we'll go back to that 2008,
0:24.4	where we just took the old model, patched it up, shoved it back in a ring,
0:28.4	and said they'll go get on with it.
0:30.1	We need a reinvention right now.
0:32.0	The damage to our economies, our health, our very beings is still unknown.
0:37.8	But could this be an opportunity to rebuild and rebuild better?
0:42.9	No crisis should go to waste right now.
0:45.1	We've heard that over and over again during the coronavirus, right?
0:49.7	That this is our chance to really rebuild, to recover.
0:54.4	But the bottom line is you can't build on broken.
0:59.4	Throughout this program, we take a look at what COVID has exposed about our cities
1:04.9	and ask the big question, is the city dead?
1:10.0	It's not the first time there's a pandemic or a plague or a flood.
1:15.0	It takes more to kill a good city. But does it? We find out in this edition of Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
1:25.1	I'm Tamison Ford.
1:37.3	Urban areas are ground zero of the COVID-19 pandemic with 90% of reported cases.
1:42.2	Cities are bearing the brunt of the crisis, many with strained health systems,
1:45.7	inadequate water and sanitation services and other challenges.
1:52.3	This is especially the case in poorer areas where the pandemic has exposed deeply rooted inequalities.
	...

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