Development of spatial planning strategies for pandemic prepared cities

Abstract

Cities are considered ground zero of such pandemics and it plays a crucial role in spreading of viruses like COVID-19. The rapid changes in terms of population are directly and indirectly creating problems and making it more and more difficult for the public to overcome the challenges on the way and hence reduce its impacts. Therefore, the impacts of such virus are devastating not only for developing countries but for developed countries as well. Not only this, but the outbreak has also derailed the achievements already made by the targets of Sustainable Development Goals in last few years which shows that SDGs and pandemic links with each other positively as well as negatively. Even though achieving the targets of SDGs plays a very crucial role in such critical times still as per the recent reports of SDG India Index and dashboard published by NITI Aayog in year 2020 and 2021, India lost three ranks i.e., from 117 to 120 within a span of a year. This clearly shows that the pandemic can be one of the reasons for negatively impacting the targets that are already achieved. With the coming of such global pandemics, it has been evidently revealed that how some cities are well prepared and are able to withstand the impacts of covid waves whereas how some others have struggled even to provide the basic requirements in their respective cities. Not only this, but even slums are also observed to have quite lower of positive cases as compared to big cities even during the peak covid times. Because of these problems, countries all around the world are continuously working on ideas to ensure that the cities are safe and resilient so as to navigate it to the post-pandemic phase. To handle such situations, smart cities in India infrastructure successfully contributed their part through its infrastructure. Initiatives like repurposing of Integrated Control Command Centers (ICCC) of 45 smart cities into COVID-19 war rooms were implemented, incorporating ideas of 30-minute city etc. were some of ideas that helped in controlling the drastic increase in covid positive cases. In such critical times, examples with efficient working of institutions came forwards and showed that developing such institutions works well in managing the spread of virus as well. One such case study was from Bhilwara, Rajasthan wherein the local government developed a model under which strategies adopted were formulated and implemented at local level but with a global outlook, therefore known as “Glocal”. Therefore, initiatives like this not only helped in containing the virus within a specific area but will also help in preparing the city as a self-sufficient city. The aim of the study is to develop preparedness strategies for COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of indicators. This was done by understanding the existing conditions of the city in terms of the indicators for pandemic preparedness with the help of household surveys, stakeholder interviews and visual surveys, then analysis were conducted based on the indicators and simultaneously inferences and conclusions were drawn that helped in identifying spatial planning strategies in terms of localised planning. Therefore, this pandemic should be considered as an opportunity to reshape and rethink urban planning to ensure that impact of future pandemics are not as devastating as the current one.