Rethinking slums, cities, and urban planning: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

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ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to informal settlements and the planning and policy failures that they represent. In this think-piece, we reflect on the impacts of both the pandemic and the draconian public health responses on lives and livelihoods of slum residents to draw lessons for future of urban planning and development policies. In particular, we offer a framework that integrates principles of slum health with the new science of cities to inform both short-term pandemic response and enable long-term planning to make our cities healthier, resilient, and equitable for all.

KEYWORDS:

• Slum health
• the new science of cities
• urban planning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. One of the authors, Phoram Shah, declares that the opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not represent those of the World Bank Group.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amit Patel

Amit Patel is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs at University of Massachusetts Boston. His research, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank Group, and International Development Research Centre, focuses on slums in global South to understand multiple housing deprivations and how they perpetuate over time, processes that lead to formation and expansion of slums, ways to identify slums from space for urban planning purposes, health consequences of living in slums, and gendered impacts of housing conditions, to draw policy implications towards improving lives of urban poor in developing countries.

Phoram Shah

Phoram Shah is Urban Specialist in the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa region. Her work includes leading the development of a global framework for inclusive cities and has extensive experience on urban upgrading, slums and informal settlements, municipal service delivery, and municipal governance in a range of countries and contexts. She currently focuses on projects supporting secondary cities and communities hosting refugees and displaced people in Jordan and Lebanon as well as analytical work related to urban resilience to displacement related shocks. She has graduate degrees in public administration from Columbia University, USA and in urban and regional planning from CEPT University, India.