“The Hope Pandemic” series addresses the changing business climate and how we can go digital and shape a new world of sustainability, kindness and community.
We’re all seeing how countries around the world are navigating the vagaries of the Covid pandemic, some continuing to stay open while others are reintroducing social distancing precautions.
We’ve also seen that not all the world has been impacted equally, and that many communities in Africa and Asia have remained strong and largely unaffected.
Some believe that people in these countries have been more resistant to this virus, and others as well, because had not been existing in the oversanitized environments of most modern countries.
There are so many learnings yet.
One big question is: how will humanity navigate the future after weathering the massive disruption of the last few years? There’s no question that there will be other viruses, and a raft of threats linked with wars, climate change and other matters. They will certainly crop up from time to time, but will we be more prepared?
While urban cities of the future are becoming increasingly more connected inwards as well as outwards, one solution is to introduce a patchwork of “micro” communities.
These smaller micro-community could be an opportunity for residents to ‘cut off’ if they need to in order to manage and mitigate risks. By coalescing into micro clusters, communities can have more freedom to operate more independently to make localized decisions. This would be to afford them autonomy up to a certain point of course. So if there’s an outbreak, the micro community could lockdown, test, monitor and conduct treatments, all without the entire economy of a nation grinding to a halt.
This approach could be explored as part of a successful response going forward.
Another advantage to creating micro-communities is that the smaller clusters could contribute to residents feeling a greater sense of community and belonging. These would in turn translate into minimizing social isolation, and to reducing commuting costs and resource waste.
By Sana Bagersh
