Post-pandemic thinking

I'm working on a book manuscript at the moment for the London Publishing Partnership. It is called 'Why Study Geography' and is due for publication later this year. It is part of a series which explores why the studying of a subject is of particular importance.
At the moment, I am working on the final few sections which draw the book together. They include vignettes from people who use geography in their careers in interesting ways. I am also, of course, updating the earlier sections to reflect the changes that have taken place since March this year. One of the resources I'm reading today is a piece by Michael Batty, who is currently the Director of the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL.
He says of the pandemic:

The fact that we are all connected so closely to everyone else due to global travel and global supply chains has spread the disease much faster than we were able to grasp. This has revealed that our perceptions of the way the world is globally connected lag far behind the actual reality, while the density of this connectivity appears to have grown exponentially since the Millennium.

Worth reading for an insight into how our cities may change in the future.


Version 8 of the New PC Geographies is being prepared at the moment.
Browse back through the blog for previous versions of the document.

Source: http://spatialcomplexity.blogweb.casa.ucl.ac.uk/files/2020/05/The-Post-Pandemic-City.pdf
(PDF download)

Also check the ONS's new weekly briefing for a digest of relevant statistics:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc894/ons-covid19-briefing.pdf (PDF download)

Image copyright: Tony Cassidy

Comments