Urban planning needs to look back first: three cities in Ghana show why
NATE PLAGEMAN, JENNIFER ANNE HART and TONY YEBOAH MONTHS into the global COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers have begun discussing what the “new normal” might look like in metropolitan environments. Some urban planners have framed COVID-19 as an opportunity to re-imagine and improve cities’ built landscapes. Such calls follow a common prescriptive: that post-epidemic planning will reinvent cities into dreamscapes of public health, equality and technological progress. Urbanism journalist Alissa Walker recently argued, though, that now is not the time for imagining an urbanist utopia. Instead, she writes, people must come to terms with the historical processes that have “made COVID-19 more…