Navigating Crises. Transient Communities for Urban Preparedness

Abstract

The crisis has been challenging cities and urban planners for decades, producing theories, scenarios, and imaginaries aimed at governing its emergence and its consequences. The latest of such crises—the COVID-19 pandemic—seems to have once again brought attention to the unsolved urgency of planning to tackle the changes and stresses caused by insurgent events, which once again appears to involve cities and their spaces as holders of both the reasons and the possible solutions to the crisis consequences. Despite the abundance of possible approaches, however, the debate has not yet clearly highlighted the operative lessons learned from these challenges. In this vein, the urban studies debate has been reflecting on the possibility to act provisionally but in a preparedness perspective, opening alternative paths, rather than proposing solutions, planning for uncertainty and complexity with temporary means and actions. An attitude that requires both the flexibility and adaptability of consolidated urban systems and the affirmation and legitimisation of collective and practical instances in an operational institutional dimension. The article briefly reviews the relevant positions in the relationship between cities and crisis; next, it highlights the role, responsibilities and relevance of planning to inhabit the consequences of the crisis, from a preparedness perspective; lastly, it calls to consider the potential alternative answers resulting from interaction with temporary communities of practice.