The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored and compounded systemic issues within nearly every sector of society, from healthcare to transportation to supply chains. It has forced disruption in previously inflexible systems and exposed the deeply rooted inequities and systemic racism that place people of color, immigrants, and lower-income individuals at significantly greater risk of economic and health impacts from disruptive events.

Climate change—an ongoing, yet slower-to-arrive threat—will have similar effects. Increased storms, coastal flooding, excess heat, drought, and other impacts will further expose and exacerbate the vulnerability and inequity created by our historic actions unless we begin now to dismantle these systemic patterns and realign our values to include and prioritize the most vulnerable members of our community. What we learn now through our failures and successes in response to COVID should serve as a lesson in adaptation and flexibility—in other words, a lesson in resilience

Our collective COVID response has shown that we can be flexible, that we can adapt and shift systems to new conditions and set aside regulatory and other limits in order to create new systems in a time of crisis. We have seen these adaptations across scales. Cities have made way for outdoor dining, redirected traffic to expand dining capacity, and created pedestrian-focused “shared streets” for community access and exercise. Restaurants have adapted in numerous ways, from shifting to outdoor dining and partial service to changing their menu entirely, depending on community need and the resources on hand. Others have gone so far as “burning it all down” and moving away from the cook-and-serve restaurant model entirely, as Irene Li of Mei Mei in Boston chose as the most appropriate “pivot” to make. Hospitals and health care facilities built critical-care centers in parking lots and manufacturing companies rapidly shifted operations to produce critically needed PPE. And textile-based companies added masks to their repertoire, often donating masks to critical communities for each mask purchased.

These shifts showed us that we have greater range than we have previously allowed for. Regulatory change is generally slow. Emergency-response projects undertaken due to COVID offer insight into moving such projects more rapidly through pilots and ongoing adaptation. Crucial to the future relevance of these projects is the scale at which they operate. Altering an entire block as an experimental response allows us to envision a new normal in a way that a single property or business making change does not. Similar to a pop-up store going online before opening a brick-and-mortar shop, these efforts can be a temporary means to gather data, experience new modes of interaction, and troubleshoot failures before we make wholesale regulatory transformation or spend decades planning to get all the pieces into place.

It would be short-sighted of us not to learn from these temporary measures and imagine how our cities could be structured to favor pedestrians over cars, to focus resources on the neighborhoods that are most in need, and implement systems that prioritize flexibility and community wellbeing over individual gain.

IT WOULD BE SHORT-SIGHTED NOT TO LEARN FROM COVID AS A TEST FOR THE UNSTABLE FUTURE THAT CLIMATE PREDICTIONS FORCE US TO ANTICIPATE.

It would similarly be short-sighted not to learn from COVID as a test for the unstable future that climate predictions force us to anticipate. Climate change will intensify the social and environmental challenges of communities that are already struggling with drought, food insecurity, housing insecurity, poor air quality, and high unemployment.

When COVID made it painfully clear that our health and our lives depended upon creating flexibility in healthcare and food-distribution systems, many communities responded creatively to test ideas and prioritize livelihoods and connection. We should approach creative solutions for the ongoing issues and climate-based risks, particularly those faced by low-income, historically disenfranchised populations and the farms and farmers that produce our food supply, with the same urgency, as though our health and our lives depend upon them. They do.

This essay was originally published in Designing the City we Want. Calls to action from the Van Alen Council in response to Covid-19.