Of Flying Cars and Pandemic Urbanism: Splintering Urban Society in the Age of Covid-19

ABSTRACT Disappointingly to many who grew up at the time, promises of flying cars in the 1960s as a future form of urban transportation were not kept. That future never arrived. In this short commentary, I want to board the metaphorical flying car and steer it into a different direction. At the height of the first wave of Covid-19, a more widespread sentiment took hold that saw the anticipation of increased mobilities dashed by a general anticipation of disaster considered typical for our age today. We might conclude: We don't get the technologies we want because we have left the era of technological progress and entered the era of risk and anticipation of disaster. My commentary appreciates and discusses the lessons we can learn from Splintering Urbanism for our period of pandemic urbanism. How does the kind of networked urbanism that the book examines and critiques provide a framework in which we can understand the emergence, presence, and management of the pandemic as it affects our urban world today?