Five urban planning and policy focus areas for pandemic resilience

What is it about?

The focus areas are based in an exhaustive, interdisciplinary review of the literature on COVID-19 and recent outbreaks, and applies urban resilience frameworks from Complex Systems research.

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Why is it important?

System-wide impacts mean that a LOT of focus areas emerge leading to confusion about priorities This paper consolidates a lot of literature from different disciplines to identify the five focus areas: to reduce disease emergence and zoonosis, focus on (1) urbanization patterns, land use, but also animal rearing practices and biodiversity maintenance; to reduce disease transmission and outbreak, focus on (2) universalizing infrastructure access to reduce host vulnerability, (3) reducing pollution to decrease pathogen persistence in environmental media, (4) building redundancy in institutions and processes like critical commodity or service supply chains, and (5) decentralizing outbreak response by nurturing participatory governance.