Unpacking the '15-Minute City' via 6G, IoT, and Digital Twins: Towards a New Narrative for Increasing Urban Efficiency, Resilience, and Sustainability.

The '15-minute city' concept is emerging as a potent urban regeneration model in post-pandemic cities, offering new vantage points on liveability and urban health. While the concept is primarily geared towards rethinking urban morphologies, it can be furthered via the adoption of Smart Cities network technologies to provide tailored pathways to respond to contextualised challenges through the advent of data mining and processing to better inform urban decision-making processes. We argue that the '15-minute city' concept can value-add from Smart City network technologies in particular through Digital Twins, Internet of Things (IoT), and 6G. The data gathered by these technologies, and processed via Machine Learning techniques, can unveil new patterns to understand the characteristics of urban fabrics. Collectively, those dimensions, unpacked to support the '15-minute city' concept, can provide new opportunities to redefine agendas to better respond to economic and societal needs as well as align more closely with environmental commitments, including the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda. This perspective paper presents new sets of opportunities for cities arguing that these new connectivities should be explored now so that appropriate protocols can be devised and so that urban agendas can be recalibrated to prepare for upcoming technology advances, opening new pathways for urban regeneration and resilience crafting.

Continuous manufacture of hydroxychloroquine sulfate drug products via hot melt extrusion technology to meet increased demand during a global pandemic: From bench to pilot scale.

During pandemics and global crises, drug shortages become critical as a result of increased demand, shortages in personnel and lockdown restrictions that disrupt the supply chain. The pharmaceutical industry is therefore moving towards continuous manufacturing instead of conventional batch manufacturing involving numerous steps, that normally occur at different sites. In order to validate the use of large-scale industrial processes, feasibility studies need to be performed using small-scale laboratory equipment. To that end, the scale-up of a continuous process and its effect on the critical quality attributes (CQAs) of the end product were investigated in this work. Hydroxychloroquine Sulphate (HCQS) was used as the model drug, Soluplus® as a model polymeric carrier and both horizontal and vertical twin screw extruders used to undertake this hot melt extrusion (HME) study. Seven formulations were processed using a small-scale horizontal extruder and a pilot-scale vertical extruder at various drug loadings, temperature profiles and screw speeds. When utilising a horizontal extruder, formulations with the highest drug load and processed at the lowest screw speed and temperature had the highest crystallinity with higher drug release rates. Upon scale-up to a vertical extruder, the crystallinity of the HCQS was significantly reduced, with less variation in both crystallinity and release profile across the different extrudates. This study demonstrates improved robustness with the pilot-scale vertical extruder compared to lab-scale horizontal extruder. The reduced variation with the vertical extruder will allow for short increases in production rate, with minimum impact on the CQAs of the final product enabling high-performance continuous manufacturing with minimum waste of raw materials. Finally, this research provides valuable information for the pharmaceutical industry in accessing continuous technologies for the manufacture of pharmaceutical products, allowing for efficient utilisation of resources upon scale-up and mass production during global pandemics and drug shortages.

Future (post-COVID) digital, smart and sustainable cities in the wake of 6G: Digital twins, immersive realities and new urban economies

With the advance of 5G technologies by both academia and industry, 5G adoption is gaining widespread acceptance in numerous cities, prompting further innovations in Smart City technologies riding on the wave of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, even in its infancy stage, the speed of technological advancement is already highlighting the limitations of 5G, and its potentially short lifespan as new technologies are rendered obsolete faster. This fast-moving field is coupled with an ongoing and increasing funding into Research & Development (R&D) efforts by private corporations, to potentially commercialise on the surge in demand for ‘smarter’ cities’, This paper aims to chart the major directions and scope emerging dimensions inherent to 6G technology, including Digital Twins and Immersive Realities (XR) that, when applied to cities that are currently being equipped with digital infrastructural backbones, may have direct socio-economic impacts upon our lives while responding to the tenets of the Sustainable Development Goal 11. Looking at the future 6G technology this article considers the prospects of 6G, and its associated concepts, and its relations as they pertain to Future, Smart, Digital and Sustainable Cities.

Preparedness and Unpreparedness: The Military Vs Medicine

From the Abstract: As the COVID-19 [coronavirus disease 2019] pandemic intensified in the spring of 2020, many Americans were shocked to see how quickly hospitals were overwhelmed in affected cities. Our medical and public health infrastructure was clearly not prepared, leading to problems with emergency medical services, acute care hospitals, nursing homes, access to adequate protective equipment, and mortuary capacity. How could this be? For several decades, the United States government has run pandemic simulations and this outcome-- overwhelmed health care systems--has been identified as a possible scenario time and time again. Yet preparations for this eventuality were halting and inadequate at best. In this essay we review the historical and policy contexts of pandemic preparedness to understand why we have been caught off-guard by something we had repeatedly foreseen. We explore the reasons for our current predicament and whether alternative approaches ought to be pursued. It is not that preparedness is impossible: the federal government invests substantial resources in military preparedness, seemingly with good effect. The problem is specific to health care and bears the imprint of our fragmented systems of financing and government oversight.COVID-19 (Disease);Disaster preparedness--Plans;Crisis management;Military readiness;Health planning

Pandemic stricken cities on lockdown. Where are our planning and design professionals [now, then and into the future]?

Chinese cities have been placed upon lockdown in early 2020 in an attempt to contain the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), as increasingly huge demands are being placed upon Chinese and international health professionals to address this pandemic. Surprisingly, planning and design professionals are absent in the discourses about existing and post-COVID-19 strategies and actions even though previous pandemics historically revealed major impacts on the urban fabric from social and economic perspectives. This paper is a call for action for international architectural and urban organisations to include pandemics and similar in their disaster management strategies. This need is very evident in their need to better design creative and relevant protocols in partnership with health discipine organisations, and so that their applied deployment in pandemic stricken cities can be effected integrated seamlessly within normal city environment planning activities and also in incident situations like containing the current COVID-19 pandemic.

On the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak and the Smart City Network: Universal Data Sharing Standards Coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Benefit Urban Health Monitoring and Management.

As the Coronavirus (COVID-19) expands its impact from China, expanding its catchment into surrounding regions and other countries, increased national and international measures are being taken to contain the outbreak. The placing of entire cities in 'lockdown' directly affects urban economies on a multi-lateral level, including from social and economic standpoints. This is being emphasised as the outbreak gains ground in other countries, leading towards a global health emergency, and as global collaboration is sought in numerous quarters. However, while effective protocols in regard to the sharing of health data is emphasised, urban data, on the other hand, specifically relating to urban health and safe city concepts, is still viewed from a nationalist perspective as solely benefiting a nation's economy and its economic and political influence. This perspective paper, written one month after detection and during the outbreak, surveys the virus outbreak from an urban standpoint and advances how smart city networks should work towards enhancing standardization protocols for increased data sharing in the event of outbreaks or disasters, leading to better global understanding and management of the same.

COVID-19, history, and humility

Abstract Amid the current COVID-19 crisis, everyone has been called upon to offer assistance. What can historians contribute? One obvious approach is to draw on our knowledge of the history of epidemics and proclaim the lessons of history. But does history offer clear lessons? To make their expertise relevant, some historians assert that there are enduring patterns in how societies respond to all epidemics that can inform our experiences today. Others argue that there are informative analogies between specific past epidemics and our present crisis, for instance between COVID-19 and prior outbreaks of SARS or influenza. Both strategies can be pursued, but each must be done with care. It is certainly possible to map COVID-19 onto the classic dramatic structure of an epidemic, but we cannot yet know how it will end, a failure of prognostication that constrains the advice we can offer. It is likewise possible to draw on the history of medical therapeutics and public health interventions to identify the risks we face of both underuse and overuse of our remedies, but we cannot yet judge whether our current commitment to heroic social distancing is warranted. While historians can offer insight, we must temper our contributions with humility.