The coronavirus pandemic will not fundamentally change cities, but could lead to more sustainable buildings, a "renaissance" for urban farming and a "new future" for monorails, says Norman Foster.
In a speech to the United Nations Forum of Mayors in Geneva, Foster said that he believes the current pandemic will not have a long-term impact on cities but will accelerate current trends.
"Is Covid-19 going to change our cities"" asked the founder of London-studio Foster + Partners. "I suggest that it might seem so now, but in the wider arc of history, the answer is no."
"Instead of change, it has merely hastened, accelerated trends of change that were already apparent before the pandemic," he continued. "Each crisis hastened and magnified the inevitable"
Foster compared the current coronavirus pandemic with previous crises that have impacted cities, which led to improvements in building standards and health-driven architecture.
"Take London as an example," he explained. "The Great Fire, 1666, created Building Codes that led to fireproof brick

construction."

"The Cholera Epidemic of the mid-nineteenth century cleaned up the Thames from an open sewer and was the birth of modern sanitisation," he added. "In its wake came the healthy dimension of public parks."
"Then Tuberculosis struck and helped the birth of the modern movement in architecture ? big windows,

sunlight...