Critical Commentary: Cities in a post-COVID world

This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic, fiscal, social and political fallout on cities and metropolitan regions. We assess the effect of the pandemic on urban economic geography at the intra- and inter-regional geographic scales in the context of four main forces: the social scarring instilled by the pandemic;the lockdown as a forced experiment;the need to secure the urban built environment against future risks;and changes in the urban form and system. At the macrogeographic scale, we argue the pandemic is unlikely to significantly alter the winner-take-all economic geography and spatial inequality of the global city system. At the microgeographic scale, however, we suggest that it may bring about a series of short-term and some longer-running social changes in the structure and morphology of cities, suburbs and metropolitan regions. The durability and extent of these changes will depend on the timeline and length of the pandemic. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR] 本文研究新冠肺炎大流行的影响及其对城市和大都市地区造成的相关经济、财政、社会和政治后果。我们在四种主要力量的背景下，在区域内和区域间地理规模上评估大流行对城市经济地理的影响。这四种力量为：大流行造成的社会创伤；作为一种强迫实验的封锁；确保城市建筑环境免遭未来风险之害的必要性；以及城市形态和系统的变化。在宏观地理规模上，我们认为大流行不太可能显著改变赢家通吃的经济地理和全球城市体系的空间不平等。然而，在微观地理规模上，我们认为它可能会给城市、郊区和大都市地区的结构和形态带来一系列短期的、以及某些长期的社会变化。这些变化的持久性和程度将取决于大流行的时间表和长度。 (Chinese) [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Alone and lonely. The economic cost of solitude for regions in Europe

Solitude is a rising phenomenon in the western world. The share of people affected by solitude has been rising for some time and the Covid-19 pandemic has further brought this trend to the fore. Yet, we know next to nothing about the aggregate subnational economic impact of the rise in solitude. In this paper, we analyse the consequences of solitude on regional economic performance across Europe, distinguishing between two of its key dimensions: alone living, proxied by the regional share of single-person households and loneliness, proxied by the aggregate share of social interactions. We find that solitude has important implications for economic development, but that these go in different directions. While alone living is a substantial driver of economic growth across European regions, high shares of lonely people undermine it. The connection of loneliness with economic growth is, however, dependent on the frequency of in-person meetings, with large shares of the population meeting others socially on a weekly basis, alongside a small percentage of people who never meet others, yielding the best economic returns. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Environment & Planning A is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Uncooperative society, uncooperative politics or both? Trust, polarization, populism and COVID-19 deaths across European regions.

Why have some territories performed better than others in the fight against COVID-19? This paper uses a novel dataset on excess mortality, trust and political polarization for 165 European regions to explore the role of social and political divisions in the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we investigate whether regions characterized by a low social and political trust witnessed a higher excess mortality. Second, we argue that it is not only levels, but also polarization in trust among citizens - in particular, between government supporters and non-supporters - that matters for understanding why people in some regions have adopted more pro-healthy behaviour. Third, we explore the partisan make-up of regional parliaments and the relationship between political division - or what we refer to as 'uncooperative politics'. We hypothesize that the ideological positioning - in particular those that lean more populist - and ideological polarization among political parties is also linked to higher mortality. Accounting for a host of potential confounders, we find robust support that regions with lower levels of both social and political trust are associated with higher excess mortality, along with citizen polarization in institutional trust in some models. On the ideological make-up of regional parliaments, we find that, ceteris paribus, those that lean more 'tan' on the 'GAL-TAN' spectrum yielded higher excess mortality. Moreover, although we find limited evidence of elite polarization driving excess deaths on the left-right or GAL-TAN spectrums, partisan differences on the attitudes towards the European Union demonstrated significantly higher deaths, which we argue proxies for (anti)populism. Overall, we find that both lower citizen-level trust and populist elite-level ideological characteristics of regional parliaments are associated with higher excess mortality in European regions during the first wave of the pandemic.

Local institutions and pandemics: City autonomy and the Black Death

Local institutions have long been regarded as key drivers of economic development. However, little is known about the role of institutions in preparing places to cope with public health crises and pandemics. This paper sheds light on how the nature of a local institution, city autonomy, influenced variations in the incidence of the Black Death —possibly the worst pandemic ever recorded— across cities in Western Europe between 1347 and 1352. We examine urban autonomy not only because it represented a major political shift in medieval times, but because, more importantly, it also represents a key prototype of modern political institution. By exploiting data on the spatial variation of Black Death's mortality rates and duration using OLS and 2SLS methods, we uncover that city autonomy reduced mortality rates by, on average, almost 10 percent. Autonomous cities were in a better position to adopt swift and efficient measures against the pandemic than those governed by remote kings and emperors. This relationship has been confirmed by a series of placebo tests and robustness checks. In contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that city autonomy was a factor in reducing the duration of the pandemic in European cities.

Cities in a post-COVID world

This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic, fiscal, social and political fallout on cities and metropolitan regions. We assess the effect of the pandemic on urban economic geography at the intra- and inter-regional geographic scales in the context of four main forces: the social scarring instilled by the pandemic;the lockdown as a forced experiment;the need to secure the urban built environment against future risks;and changes in the urban form and system. At the macrogeographic scale, we argue the pandemic is unlikely to significantly alter the winner-take-all economic geography and spatial inequality of the global city system. At the microgeographic scale, however, we suggest that it may bring about a series of short-term and some longer-running social changes in the structure and morphology of cities, suburbs and metropolitan regions. The durability and extent of these changes will depend on the timeline and length of the pandemic. (English) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] 本文研究新冠肺炎大流行的影响及其对城市和大都市地区造成的相关经济、财政、社会和政治后果。我们在四种主要力量的背景下，在区域内和区域间地理规模上评估大流行对城市经济地理的影响。这四种力量为：大流行造成的社会创伤；作为一种强迫实验的封锁；确保城市建筑环境免遭未来风险之害的必要性；以及城市形态和系统的变化。在宏观地理规模上，我们认为大流行不太可能显著改变赢家通吃的经济地理和全球城市体系的空间不平等。然而，在微观地理规模上，我们认为它可能会给城市、郊区和大都市地区的结构和形态带来一系列短期的、以及某些长期的社会变化。这些变化的持久性和程度将取决于大流行的时间表和长度。 (Chinese) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Institutions and the uneven geography of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper examines the uneven geography of COVID-19-related excess mortality during the first wave of the pandemic in Europe, before assessing the factors behind the geographical differences in impact. The analysis of 206 regions across 23 European countries reveals a distinct COVID-19 geography. Excess deaths were concentrated in a limited number of regions-expected deaths exceeded 20% in just 16 regions-with more than 40% of the regions considered experiencing no excess mortality during the first 6 months of 2020. Highly connected regions, in colder and dryer climates, with high air pollution levels, and relatively poorly endowed health systems witnessed the highest incidence of excess mortality. Institutional factors also played an important role. The first wave hit regions with a combination of weak and declining formal institutional quality and fragile informal institutions hardest. Low and declining national government effectiveness, together with a limited capacity to reach out across societal divides, and a frequent tendency to meet with friends and family were powerful drivers of regional excess mortality.

Introduction: Nodes in global networks

The on-going COVID-19 crisis demonstrates how interlinked and networked our globalized society has become. Overall, the special issue advances our knowledge of nodes in global networks by further investigating the particularities of such nodes, drawing conclusions on both the nodes themselves and the networks they are involved in. Yet, there are also examples of gateway cities serving as engines of peripheral growth (Scholvin, 2017), which indicates that considerably more research is needed to fully understand nodes in global networks from this particular angle. These functions are not necessarily additive, meaning that gateways are diverse - both in terms of the role they play in global networks and regarding their spatial range (Breul, 2019;Breul & Revilla Diez, 2017;Scholvin, 2020a). [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Growth & Change is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)