Is the pandemic a hope for planning? Two doubts.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the critical events of the current times. Numerous authors believe the pandemic seriously changes the discussion, including urban policy. However, as the months since the pandemic outbreak has passed, some doubts have been raised. Were the hopes expressed at the first stage of the pandemic even correct? And what, concretely, should the proposed changes look like in the different (so strongly differentiated) countries and cities? An excellent illustration of the original early hopes was Ihnji Jon’s essay published in 2020, "A manifesto for planning after the coronavirus: Towards planning of care." Among other things, the author attempted to define a new pandemic-determined approach to planning. She identified some directions. These include inclusive planning practising a ’veil of ignorance’, planning for care in humankind, extending care to other beings, and a call to rethink the relationship between nature and human intervention. I share the assessments, demands, and emotions expressed in the essay. I find them visionary and interestingly formulated. However, after reading the text 2 years after its publication, in a somewhat different reality, I begin to have two kinds of doubts. The first doubt is whether the pandemic has a significant impact (on a global scale) on the directions of urban policies and whether subsequent events have not complicated earlier diagnoses. The second doubt concerns how legitimate demands are transferred to concrete urban policies. Here, I am primarily puzzled by the context of legal solutions in urban planning. At the same time, already at this stage, it is worth signalling that the issues taken up by the author have found continuity in other publications. One can point to the detailed delineation of the planes of urban policy response to the pandemic (Sharifi and KhavarianGarmsir, 2020) and the emphasis on the role (and necessity) of linking urban policy to health policy (Frumkin, 2021). There have also been views about the inadequacy of the pandemic challenge of the ’friendly cities’ solutions practised so far (Moreno et al., 2021). Nevertheless, the concerns signalled above are also valid.