Letter from the Editors

When we selected the themes for the 2019- 2020 academic year, we could not have predicted how much of our lives, our world, and our environment would be altered with the emergence of COVID-19. As urban planners, we, like many of our colleagues, are deeply concerned and angered by the lack of resolve to address our climate crisis. Our urgency for intersectional and robust climate action had propelled us to ask:

how can we begin to ideologize cities, spaces and our natural environment in a more circular, holistic and just way?

As we wrote in our last letter, we are now more than ever, in a moment of forced adaptation or face likely obsolescence. Like disasters before it, COVID-19 has shocked and exploited our individual and collective vulnerabilities--with our most precarious populations the most hard-hit. It has also highlighted the best in us--from the balcony cheers in thanks and solidarity to our frontline workers to the assemblage and organization of mutual aid funds and localized support networks to the production of PPE in our very own Making Studio. Collectively, we are working to fill gaps when and where they exist. As architects, planners, and designers, this pandemic offers us a critical moment to reflect and derive purpose. Either six-feet-away or halfway across the globe, COVID-19 is a collective condition, challenge, and opportunity for all of us to ideologize and produce better futures. And if anything good has come from this, it is that we now know we have within us the propensity to act swiftly and urgently in response to crisis. While not every piece in this issue covers COVID-19, they do implore you, as they have for us, to consider what our collective emergence will look like, conceptually and practically? We can’t possibly know when or how we will all be together again, or understand the gravity of our losses and failures in this very moment; all that we can do is remain hopeful in our shared humanity and urgency.

URBAN’s Senior Editors,

Maya, Conor and Kirthana