ABSTRACT
For the past two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has considerably paralysed public life in Europe. Planners and urban researchers have been speculating for months about the consequences of the pandemic for urban development and urban planning: for mobility in the city, for work and housing, for culture and the cultural industry, for the financial budgets of municipalities and the consequences for tourism and rural areas. Currently, the question of whether, after the pandemic, everything will remain as it was, or whether anything will change and, if so, what and where, is dominating the discussion in public and expert circles. The aim of this paper is to describe how cities in China reacted to the outbreak of Covid-19, what restrictions people in Chinese cities had to live with temporarily and how they reacted to these, what restrictions the local economy had to take on and why Chinese cities were apparently better prepared for the epidemic than European cities. From a European perspective, it is also interesting to assess what will change in China's cities after the pandemic and whether and which cities in Europe can learn from this.