A qualitative approach in comparing six cities toward a resilient response plan: COVID-19 and inequalities

Abstract

COVID-19 has dramatically affected financial markets, economies, and societies worldwide and exposed pre-existing inequalities in cities. This work aims to understand the inequalities in some cities worldwide, their reasons and circumstances, and impacts to drive lessons for future prevention, intervention, and post-catastrophe/ hazard plans such as COVID-19 that would raise resilience and decrease damages. Six major cities were included in the analysis and contrasted based on specific assessment criteria. The study included the impact of the pandemic on the economy and the government's responses global crisis. Additionally, newfound measures and technologies developed to control the hazard, including the community's response and cooperation to solving the issue were explored. The outcomes of this work shed a light on problems to be addressed in the future towards enhances the resilience of cities pre- and post- global crisis. Through the comparisons made in this paper, conclusions regarding the cities' successful combat against COVID-19 were drawn. According to the comparative analysis, it became apparent that poverty, culture, and governance are primary factors that control the success of states under emergency. Moreover, it is understood that technology is a significant factor in combating pandemics and health emergencies as large as COVID-19, especially for tracking and monitoring.

Keywords COVID-19, Resilient cities, Spatial inequality, Temporal inequality, Infrastructure, Governance practice, Technologies, Lockdown