Collection 

Covid, Cities and Sustainability

Submission status
Open

Pandemic conditions have imposed a natural experiment upon global populations. The dramatic changes in societal interactions due to social distancing measures to control the spread of the virus disrupt normal routines and the ability to connect to the larger world as part of daily life. Cities are innovating and are embracing new strategies to safely maintain access to public space to provide a critical connection to the larger world. These changes are reshaping the landscape of cities by reducing pollution, supporting urban local food systems, spurring changes to local biodiversity and improving opportunities for multimodal transportation.

To understand the influence of changes in city policy and practice that facilitate access to nature and the outdoors in response to the pandemic, Biophilic Cities and its partners in the Biophilic Cities Network are undertaking research with two broad components.

The first aim will be to catalog and assess best practices that cities are utilizing during the time of the pandemic. Investigations will combine recent cell phone data with existing data to analyze which policies influence the ability of vulnerable populations to use urban green space during the time of the pandemic. The second aim is to examine how lessons learned from the current pandemic instruct cities as to their future planning and design, so that urban communities can maximize their resilience in response to future natural resource crises and pandemics.

This new themed Collection of npj Urban Sustainability will help us understand how cities are adapting to the Covid pandemic to enable them to be:

  • more resilient in the future, and
  • more sustainable as they respond to new opportunities created from the Covid-related economic disruption.
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Editors

The Collection will publish original research papers, and articles in various formats (full details on content types can be found here). Papers will be published in npj Urban Sustainability as soon as they are accepted and then collected together and promoted on the Collection homepage. All Collections are associated with a call for papers and are managed by one or more journal editors and/or Guest Editors.

This Collection welcomes submissions from all authors – and not by invitation only – on the condition that the manuscripts fall within the scope of the Collection and of npj Urban Sustainability more generally. All submissions  are subject to the same peer review process and editorial standards as regular npj Urban Sustainability articles, including the journal’s policy on competing interests. The Editors declare no competing interests with the submissions which they have handled through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editor who has no competing interests. For more information, refer to our Collections guidelines.

This Collection is not supported by sponsorship.