Urban mobility: moving forward post COVID19

The main aim of the webinar is to discuss how public open spaces such as streets, squares, parks, might change, or might need to change because of Covid-19. Since PEREKABANDAR’s concern is about urban design and the quality of the built environment, urban mobility thus plays a very important role in ensuring the accessibility and connectivity of places,and can impact the vitality of public spaces directly. How Covid-19 has affected urban mobility, for example in how ridership and operation of public transport have been impacted by the social distancing requirement, and other forms of mobility that might have emerged, or not, given the different contexts? If we looked at places like Milan and Bogota, and later on Oakland, these cities were quick to reclaim some space from cars so people can walk or cycle. But we haven’t really seen any of these measures put in place here. Why do you think that is? Our public transport system is still very KL-centric, and even then it’s still not comprehensive. Do you think that the progress of building and providing public transport infrastructure will be hampered by the pandemic, especially given the risk of crowding on public transport? Will people’s fear reduce the demand and thus the authority might see no point in developing the system? And now that we are slowly making our way back into the city, what are the possible urban mobility strategies to support the vitality of public spaces, taking into account the requirements imposed by the pandemic? And more importantly is how our local contextual conditions is taken into account? For example, our cities are not exactly mixed in terms of functions, many people actually live in suburbs. So how can urban mobility play a role in revitalising public spaces taking all these things into consideration