Social Rules For Our Cities

Social Rules For Our Cities

Economic Crisis: Kovid-19 Global GDP, Economic Development, New Social Contract, Urban Poor, Urban Policy, Urbanization

Many cities are struggling due to weaknesses in their disaster management capacity and lack of community participation methods

According to World Bank estimates, the Kovid-19 pandemic could push 70 to 100 million people under the international line of poverty of US $ 1.90 per day. Countries like India and Nigeria, where there is a large population of the poor, have the highest risk.

The epidemic has badly exposed structural inequality in the cities of developing countries. We have long been hiding the deep social divide in cities with regard to housing, clean water, sanitation and public health care facilities, but now it is troubling us because there is a billion population living in slums or urban population of the world 24 per cent of the population is finding it difficult to meet basic hygiene requirements such as washing hands and physical distance

To save the poor from economic shocks, many countries have announced cash transfer, food subsidy and other welfare packages. But such efforts of different countries to combat the global aspects of poverty caused by the epidemic are not enough. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres emphasized more multilateral cooperation and appealed for ‘new social rules of the new age’ to counter the ‘epidemic of inequality’.

We need a new social rule that pays attention to the increasing distance in cities and creates a more inclusive path to take towards the right condition.

The strategy of national and global economic recovery needs to take into account the urban aspects of the epidemic. In fact, the cities are on the front in the face of the epidemic and the impact on people’s lives and their livelihoods. There is also a need to create a policy focused on cities with incentive packages and welfare measures.

How the city reacts to the crisis is largely determined by its disaster management capability, nature of urbanization and the existing service delivery system.

As the recent experience of Kovid-19 suggests, the economic effects spread far beyond the surrounding areas and also affect the remote rural areas. According to estimates by the International Labor Organization, global work hours decreased by 14 percent in the second quarter of 2020 due to the lockdown, which is equivalent to 400 million full-time job losses.

According to an estimate, 90 percent of the cases of Kovid-19 are in urban areas. But cities are also connected with employment, aspirations and economic changes. Cities contribute 80 percent of the global GDP.

The risk of cities is related to their logistic work. Cities are centers of money, goods, people and sometimes epidemics. Metropolises are not only a place of production and consumption, but also centers of transactions between global and regional transport networks and supply chains.

The informal economy has been particularly devastating. 90 percent of the employment in poor countries is in the informal economy.

The quality and effectiveness of urban governance matters: Good governance can break the virus infection chain and build strength. Conversely, a lack of governance can worsen the crisis and increase the urban threat. Socio-economic inequality, lack of access to basic amenities and living conditions in the dirt add to the public health crisis.

Due to this, the risk increases in cities. But the spread of Kovid-19 infection is not the same in different cities, rather they are the product of already existing mistakes. In cities with similar population densities and equal levels of economic development, they have shown different abilities to overcome the corona virus.

How a city reacts to a crisis is determined to a large extent by its disaster management capability, nature of urbanization and the existing service delivery system.

So far, the ground level efforts of local governments and community activists have been successful in preventing massive infection of Kovid-19 in some major slums such as Dharavi in ​​Mumbai or Rosinha Favilas in Rio de Janeiro. But there are reports that in areas like Orangi Town in Karachi, Pavata in Manila or Kibera in Nairobi, cases are increasing in silence.

A population dashboard of the United Nations Population Fund facing the threat of Kovid-19 allows the elderly, people living alone, population density, household size, the number of people living in a room, clean water and

Slums and unauthorized settlements are 10 times more crowded than occupied areas, where tens of people live in one room, where hundreds of people use a toilet and where water comes intermittently, people living first Pandemics such as H1N1, swine flu and dengue were significantly affected.

It is important that a critical approach is taken to deal with the epidemic because the urban poor are not a common community. Their access to risk varies due to reasons like gender, age etc.

Reliable statistics about unauthorized settlements are often not available. It is also difficult to find the infected, especially in the small slums of second-tier cities. In such a situation, there is no place for laxity.