Resilience, Fragility, and Robustness: Cities and COVID-19

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on cities around the world. In this paper, we analyse city fragility and resilience through the lens of the social compact framework. This framework enables an understanding of the interplay of agreements between citizens and city, state and national governments that exist within city systems. We examine three different case studies during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand instances of fragility in developed cities and how this fragility can affect a city's capability to respond to sudden disasters or emergencies. We identify the challenges and nuances that come with attempting to address urban fragility and improve city resilience, before finally presenting robustness as a way to conceptualise complex city systems and a means to thinking about more pro-active and adaptive policy.