Prof. Dr. Feride Bahar IŞIN
20.01.2021 – Cities in the Spiral of Covid
Today, cities seek to position themselves through their relative comparative advantages as tourist attraction centres and as preferred places of residence. Cities are in constant competition on a global scale for financial, scientific and human capital. They need investors, experts, a labour force, and tourists who will be captivated by the city’s story and beauty and bring money into its budget. The transformation of modern cities into “smart”, “green” and “creative” places also creates important stimuli regarding investing in the city, beginning to live in the city, or choosing the city as an interesting place. While the green city depicts a state of having attained, or making progress towards, long-term environmental sustainability (Lindfield and Steinberg, 2012), the creative city is shaped by cultural industries, the experience economy and urban governance (Smith and Warfield, 2008); the smart city, in turn, refers to settlements where information and communication technologies are used to enhance quality of life, the efficiency of urban operations and services, and competitiveness (International Telecommunication Union, 2014). City marketing and branding also play an important role in this process. Cities that have a story and can support that story with the past, the present and the future can strengthen their perception as brand cities. Today, one of the strong differentiating factors that cities use to set themselves apart from others is their strategies and awareness regarding the global pandemic and its conditions. After Covid-19, the most pronounced change in settlement areas in cities is the trend towards the centralisation of work and education. The role this situation plays in the restructuring of the labour market will have a pronounced effect on urban structural change in the long term. If remote working becomes the new normal in the post-pandemic world, many businesses are likely to consider reducing their office space in business districts and relocating. In cities, it is important to build infrastructure, technology and systems to combat global pandemics, in particular to improve access to healthcare facilities and food supplies, and even to create self-sufficient living spaces designed for lockdown conditions. Green cities can create solutions to the negative effects of lockdown while alleviating the psychological pressure that the pandemic places on people. Smart cities, for their part, are critically important in the context of optimising demand-based transport, conducting preventive and detective monitoring using data such as movement, location, personal health records and body temperature, and managing personal data. They can also work efficiently and effectively in tracking patient numbers, balancing the supply and demand levels of hospitals that have exceeded their practical capacity against other hospitals, ensuring access to key logistical elements such as protective masks, gloves, intensive-care supplies and medicines, tracking healthcare personnel, and providing access to food and other necessary supplies. In addition, the problems of supply shortages and the weakening of supply chains caused by unusual behaviour such as panic buying in pharmacies and supermarkets, as well as the provision of essential food and health supplies, can also be managed more successfully in smart cities. Creative cities, in turn, can offer attractive and satisfying alternatives to residents by combining the experience economy with the possibilities of technology to address the problem of weakened interpersonal interaction required by lockdown and social distancing. Today, the global pandemic and all the experiences that follow it offer a set of distinctive strategies and opportunities to cities aspiring to become brands. This experience creates an opportunity for our cities to take their place among the high-brand-value cities of choice, by using it to improve themselves and to combat extraordinary conditions more efficiently and effectively.
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