Insight from "Towards Healthy Cities in the Age of Pandemics"

As life returned to normal in New Zealand, rather than ‘return to business as usual’, Lee saw this as an opportunity to change, to reflect on how urban planners and designers could design better public spaces and manage the public realm better, in order to create liveable and walkable communities with active travel options. 

One of Lee’s first realizations of COVID was how un-resilient parts of the urban systems were, the pandemic highlighted underlying problems in societies, such as access to affordable housing, access to technology, homelessness, but also the social costs of social dislocation, and the issue of building housing blocks on productive soils. The concepts of liveability and resilience were well discussed on documents and policies, but the reality is car-centric areas and city growth patterns. Post-COVID is a chance to create a new urban form, and to set in place policies and plans that would create a different set of normative behaviour and actions and sustainable resilient communities. Lee also identified several barriers to change, including the preference for large single stand-alone houses, the perception of loss of property values, balancing affordability and negative gearing of the housing market, the need for stronger state intervention, and the ability for the industry to build non-generic housing. As a professional and educator, Lee believed that this is the time to capture the narrative and steer it into the direction of delivering liveable, sustainable, and resilient local communities.