Cities worldwide are still experiencing the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic throughout all their municipal departments. In addition to public health care, municipal services must be maintained during the crisis. Local governments must also ensure their own ability to function properly. Some consequences of the pandemic, such as halting economic development, hit local authorities first. Municipalities are currently having to learn to cope with new situations very fast. But the crisis has also shown how important the resilience of municipalities is: this directly applies to local crisis management and disaster preparedness as well as the need for continually adaptive urban planning and development towards increasing the resilience of cities. The current crisis has shown and proven once again that resilience is an essential capacity of municipalities.
Many cities and municipalities have found solutions to the new challenges and developed new strategies. In order to better address the issues related to the pandemic, it is now necessary to share and possibly develop these solutions and strategies together.
From August to December 2020, the international community of practice for sustainable urban development Connective Cities is organising a series of virtual exchange formats on measures, challenges, and solutions to overcome the corona crisis in cooperation with engaged urban practitioners (municipal experts as well as local experts from academia, civil society and business).
The series of virtual exchange events targets German and international urban practitioners working on various aspects of municipal strategies to cope with the COVID-19 crisis. Presentations of good practice examples will encourage the participating stakeholders to exchange ideas. Developing customized and practical solutions for relevant affected cities can also be an additional and beneficial outcome of the series in the context of a follow-up cooperation.
Some of these virtual meetings will have a specific regional focus, while others will have a global approach and will be open to participation across the world regions.
The thematic areas of the event series are:
Connective Cities is organising a virtual global exchange series from 23rd November to 01st December 2020 on the topic "Municipal Response to COVID-19" and cordially invites you to participate in this series of events.
Strategic Prepardness and Response Plan Using GIS
The video shows how the city of Hazmieh was enabled to obtain a fully functional Geographic Information System (GIS) and how GIS played the main role in increasing significantly the municipality's yearly income. Now, the strategic preparedness via GIS allowed the immediate planning and execution of an emergency plan against COVID-19...
Beni-Khalled is a city of about 26.000 inhabitants in the North-East of Tunisia. COVID-19 led to an unknown wave of solidarity. For the first time, all association and NGOs there united for a successful funding campaign to equip regional hospitals and healthcare workers with protective equipment and clothing. Young people volunteered to ensure security measures in public areas and to provide food for lock-downed and elderly people…
"The only constant thing is change."
Dr. Mervat Al Muheirat, Deputy City Manager for Health and Agriculture, explains her response plan to COVID-19 for the Jordanian capital and its successful implementation. Amman is home to about 50% of the Jordanian population. In the meantime, most of the restrictions have been gradually lifted.
Excellent in fighting COVID-19
As a result of the successful measures, there have so far been only nine cases tested positive in this city of approx. 50,000 inhabitants. The recipe for success: a comprehensive but composed communication strategy, 100% compliance of the population with the measures, extensive disinfection measures, and monitoring and tracking of all measures through an innovative GIS-based database according to the latest state of the art.