COVID-19 and the City: Reframing Our Understanding of Urbicide by Learning from the Pandemic

The magnitude and reach of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought multiple effects into our lives. Cities have been one of the most important stages of such changes in both material and symbolic dimensions. Against this backdrop, this chapter analyses the main effects of this pandemic through the lens of the concept of urbicide with a focus on Europe. Accordingly, the chapter discusses five sub-dimensions: the material reconfiguration of environmental balance and commonplace system, as well as the symbolic reconfiguration of social cohesion, consumer sovereignty and democratic institutions. The discussion points out both destructive and constructive sides of this pandemic, which ultimately demands the reframing of our understanding of the urbicide. To do so, we identify the main pandemic effects, briefly classified as revealing, accelerating and cluttering, along with the solutions in place to mitigate, adapt and/or transform local governance, in association with five main domains: environment, planning, society, economy and democracy. Based on the acknowledgement that pandemic's effects have not been linear, our main argument builds on the need to reframe our conceptual lens to improve the interpretive potentiality of the urbicide, thus incorporating a regenerative ethos about ongoing societal and urban transformations. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Territorial Vulnerabilities, Pandemic and Employment: An Ex-ploratory Analysis of Municipal Socioeconomic Profiles and Impacts of COVID-19 in Portugal

The pandemic originated a set of impacts of different magnitudes in the territory. This article presents an exploratory approach to understand how the existence of certain vulnerabilities in the pre-crisis moment led to different impacts on territories in Portugal. Starting from the municipal scale, the analysis defines a typology of vulnerable territories according to the degrees of exposure and susceptibility they present, and compares the different groups of municipalities in this typology with territorial impacts of the pandemic crisis in terms of unemployment dynamics. The results attest to the existence of increased vulnerabilities in territories highly dependent on tourism and those that are part of metropolitan areas, whose socioeconomic structures resulted in situations of higher un-employment growth in 2020. The article has implications for reflection on territorial vulnerability, resilience and policies to transform the Portuguese economy in the post-pandemic period. © 2023,Revista Portuguesa de Estudos Regionais. All Rights Reserved.

COVID-19 and negative oil prices – an empirical analysis comparing importing and exporting countries

The coronavirus pandemic has forced lockdown in many countries, reducing the use of vehicles and planes, resulting in a negative oil demand shock. In the USA, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil FOB spot price was recorded to be negative $36.98 per barrel on April 20, 2020. This would seem to be good news for oil importers and bad news for oil exporters. However, the results of an event study analysis of indices data ranging from July 1, 2019 to May 29, 2020 present a different picture. The incidence of a negative oil price had a negative impact on the stock markets of both major oil importing and exporting countries, although the effects on exporting countries were much more negative. Cumulative average abnormal returns, measured using a historical mean model and in reference to the event day of April 20, were significantly negative for all groups in the first two days, vanishing quickly in the very short term. Copyright © 2023 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.