The upcoming World Architecture Festival (WAF) is themed ‘resetting the city’. The AJ asked architects and design professionals across the world how their cities had reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic
Covid-19 has forced cities across the world to rethink.
The havoc wreaked by the pandemic on transport, offices and retail has exposed the lack of resilience in our urban environments. Its effects were not experienced equally, with those in overcrowded housing and lack of access to green space hardest-hit.
As people drained from the city centres and car use plummeted, some citizens got a glimpse of how things could be different. Cafés took over streets with outdoor seating, new bike lanes cropped up and air pollution lifted.
With ‘Resetting the City’ the theme of this year’s World Architecture Festival (WAF), the AJ spoke to architects and design professionals in five different countries to find out what the post-Covid future looks like where they are.
We spoke to: MK Leung of Ronald Lu & Partners Architects in Hong Kong; Hanna Harris, chief design officer for Helsinki; Heather Dodd, co-founder of Savage + Dodd in Johannesburg; Moscow chief architect Sergey Kuznetzov; and Rick Bell, adjunct associate professor at Columbia University in New York.
All the participants will be speaking at WAF this December, which will be live-streamed exclusively to festival delegates.+INFO: The Africa Report
+IMATGES: The Africa Report
