Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Declining Cities, Urban Vacant Land Uses, Green Infrastructure, and Their Impact on Climate Change Hazards

Declining And Shrinking Cities

City-regions and urban areas develop, expand or decline, remaining sensitive to environmental and climate change agendas guided by spatial planning regulations. Cities that are experiencing shrinkage and decline facing different challenges. Around the globe, cities are either growing and expanding or shrinking and declining because some dynamic processes such as deindustrialization, globalization, demographic change (Martinez-Fernandez, Audirac, Fol, & Cunningham-Sabot, 2012; McKinsey and Company, 2016; Sassen, 2001; Hall, 1993). Besides the complexity of these challenges, there are the global warming and climate change affecting urban settings (Ruth and Coelho, 2007).

The economic growth processes of cities that benefited from the development of some comparative and competitive advantages in the past, have led to the corresponding deindustrialization processes while unplugged from the global value chain and resulting in urban population and economic decline (Hall, 1993; Pike et al., 2016; Martinez-Fernandez et al., 2012: 220). Patterns of economic decline and depopulating in communities caused by contextual conditions result in vacant land with implications in institutional, fiscal, and programmatic responses that may bring some potential benefits.

Urban areas in large cities of the developed world regions experience population decline (McKinsey and Company, 2016). Economic and urban decline is linked to limited regulation over the land use in the different locations and forms of new urban development supported by deficient urban spatial planning, small changes in green infrastructure cover and lack of strategies aimed to the mitigation of socioeconomic inequality and environmental degradation. All these factors have an impact on the related implications for adaptive capacity to cope the risks from urban weather and climate change.