AI-generated summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted cities worldwide, especially smart cities like New York, London, and Milan, revealing the urgent need to rethink urban governance. Expert Paola Subacchi emphasizes a three-dimensional governance model focusing on sustainability, resilience, and inclusion to address current and future pandemic challenges. Cities must integrate these dimensions into their governance frameworks in coordination with regional, national, and international authorities to ensure a unified and effective response to health crises. Without such integration, cities risk systemic collapse in the face of ongoing or future outbreaks.
Smart cities leverage information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as big data, artificial intelligence (AI), drones, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor real-time changes, predict trends, and optimize emergency responses. Examples include Beijing and Shenzhen using AI for temperature checks at transport hubs, and Shanghai employing voice recognition bots for health monitoring. However, no city currently has a comprehensive pandemic response roadmap, highlighting a critical gap to be addressed immediately. Initiatives like SmartCitiesWorld’s Covid-19 content hub and the Smart Cities Council’s “Activator – COVID-19 Mitigation Roadmap” platform aim to support cities by sharing knowledge and enabling collaborative response planning. Ultimately, cities must embed pandemic preparedness into their governance to build sustainable, resilient, and inclusive urban environments for the future.
The world's cities are facing a great challenge: to ensure that Covid-19 harms their citizens as little as possible. What can smart cities do?
Cities, and above all, smart cities, have become the “hot spots” of the coronavirus: New York, Guayaquil, London, Madrid, Milan appear in the news every day, overwhelmed by the social and health drama they face.
What are cities doing? Which initiatives are the most promising? Are smart cities reacting? How should they prepare for the future?
Our expert, Paola Subacchi, when explaining the role of city governance, warned us of the necessary three-dimensionality of such governance: sustainability, resilience and inclusion.
The new vector of forces posed by the pandemic has broken the dynamic balance of cities around the world. The three dimensions of governance must be reviewed, rethought and recreated in order to, firstly, deal with
City governance must be coordinated with regional, national and international governance, so that ajoint, powerful and early response to this threat can be given.
When we talk about smart cities, this governance is supported by ICTs. Smart cities have information technologies deployed that allow them to:
- By using big data, alert of abnormal changes occurring in cities in real time, such as changes in mobility and traffic flow.
- To make predictive analyses of this behaviour thanks to AI and facilitate decision-making.
- Use new technologies such as drones to respond to emergencies, such as the current health crisis.
- Through the use of the Internet of Things, optimize the routes of public transport , ambulances and security forces.
To illustrate smart city solutions to the coronavirus, some examples:
- Beijing and Shenzhen have used AI-powered technology in transportation hubs to check travelers’ temperatures and identify those who might be infected.
- In Shanghai, AI-powered voice recognition bots are used to contact at-risk citizens to determine health conditions and recommend personalized care.
In any case, today there are no cities, no matter how smart we want to call them, that have a well-defined roadmap to act in the event of a pandemic. And that is the work they must tackle without delay.
Coordination in the face of the emergency we are suffering affects all the systems and levels of a city: public transport, public safety, social services (which will have to make a deep reflection to increase the resilience of the whole and, above all, of the most affected population, so that the tremendous infections in nursing homes are not repeated) and the health system, among others. It is clear that models for managing crises associated with disease transmission will need to be integrated into city ecosystems so that they can be controlled more effectively, with an effective early warning system being the key and the basis.
Interesting initiatives have already been launched to prepare cities for pandemics. Here are some of them:
One of them is that of the specialist portal SmartCitiesWorld: It has created a Covid-19 content hub that presents news, case studies, opinions and applications on how cities and their associated ecosystems are using technology, innovative solutions and smart thinking to face the impacts of the virus.
With greater ambitions is the Smart Cities Council’s initiative: they have developed a new collaborative online tool for cities to mitigate their response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). The platform, “Activator – COVID-19 Mitigation Roadmap,” can help city leaders or task forces visualize their response plan and collaborate remotely. The tool allows different actors to collaborate in real-time, publishes information in the most appropriate format depending on the recipient (political leaders, city managers, residents, etc.), and allows stakeholders to see how other cities are handling the response.
The challenge now is to incorporate best practices in the fight against pandemics into the governance of cities, in their three dimensions of sustainability, resilience and inclusion.
If you want to delve into what the big challenges of cities are and the main trends, visit the Future Trends Forum trend page: Disruptive cities.
Directora de Investigación de Economía Internacional en Chatham House
