In the dramatic age of Covid-19, how can cities become a safer place to invent, explore, test, and live as open community? What are the strategies to face global challenges and at the same time to enhance urban inclusiveness and urban economies? How should cities act as open and interconnected places and, at the same time, guarantee the right to health?
Many cities use diffuse sensors and open data to assess problems and activate effective solutions: these cities should recycle and give new covid-proof life to urban spaces, infrastructures and landscapes, stimulate the widespread creativity to create new urban economic systems, recover urban manufacturing productivity, especially when it is linked to digital innovation, and empower the economic strength of
local gateways, such as the ports. The covid-proof city should increase the green infrastructure network to provide appropriate solutions to climate change.
Above all, a covid-proof city should be an “augmented city” that improves its cosmopolitan dimension. In the field of urban planning we need a new path to plan our “augmented city” by refusing top-down conformative masterplan, and drafting incremental and adaptive strategies to generate new self-sufficient metabolism – in terms of funding, managing, implementation – instead of waiting for an opportunity, intercepting local, national and international resources within a design of the future and not with ravenous improvisation.
The aim of the Cosmopolitan Habitat Workshop/Conference is to debate and reflect about the ongoing re-positioning of urban planning in the last years and how this can be a new paradigm for urbanism. Due to rapid transformation in cities and to increasing global challenges, urban planning is not only questioning its theoretical concepts and practical tools: the main change is seen in the pathways of innovation of the discipline that connects for this task in new ways to society and to other disciplines.
Further information:
www.cosmopolitanhabitat.org
