Video Q&A: How Covid Could Change Cities for the Better

Greetings,

For all the suffering Covid-19 has caused, especially in cities, life under lockdown has yielded at least one unexpected victory for urbanists. With a third of the world’s population quarantined, car traffic—the scourge of safe streets advocates everywhere—has thinned to a trickle.

Not only are people driving less, but in cities from Bogota to Berlin, transit planners are racing to open formerly car-clogged streets to pedestrians and cyclists in an effort to improve social distancing.

As urbanism and design writer Allison Arieff noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, the coronavirus pandemic offers a chance “to see our cities for the first time without the choking traffic, dirty air and honking horns that have so often made them intolerable.”

Could this be the beginning of a new era in transportation planning in which the automobile is finally usurped from center stage? And what role will urban design play in protecting us against this and future pandemics?

Allison Arieff and Curbed editor Alissa Walker will join the next Triple M webinar on Friday, May 8th at 9am PT / 12pm ET to discuss what cities will look like after the Covid-19 reset.

Sign up for Triple M (free for 30 days) to join the webinar on Zoom.

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