| Abstract | The emergence of the Sars-Cov-2 virus in December 2019 affected the various regions, countries, and communities around the world unequally. Addressing the current pandemic should be understood as a step toward more resilient cities, rather than only focusing on the emergency response and managing a particular crisis. More resilient systems should be more capable of responding to future pandemics or other massive public health issues, and the postpandemic “new normal” could be more sustainable if urban systems incorporate improvements and learn from this crisis. Thus, the pandemic has been an opportunity to think about resilient, creative, and innovative cities with better governance models, safer public spaces, and improved infrastructures. The pandemic constitutes a reminder of the importance of being better connected in order to flexibly adapt to challenges of organizing work in an innovative manner. It is also essential to think about how cities can generate more inclusive opportunities for their inhabitants. Advances in making cities more inclusive, safe, and sustainable as a response to pandemics have the potential of bringing them a step forward on the path to resilience, not only regarding future pandemics, but mostly in confronting perpetual structural challenges and pressures. This book presents a series of contributions, both essays and empirically based case studies from Latin America and Asia (mostly China), on the challenges that the novel coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021 posed on urban systems. The multidisciplinary contributions are placed in different political, social, and economic contexts and are founded in their respective disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological context. Nevertheless, they all contribute to the discussion of urban resilience of cities under the influence of a global crisis. |
