After the Contagion. Ghost City Centres: Closed “Smart” or Open Greener?

Abstract

This paper has three main objectives. It traces the “closed” urban model of city development, critiques it at length, showing how it has led to an unsustainable dead-end, represented in post-Covid-19 “ghost town” status for many central cities, and proposes a new “open” model of city design. This is avowedly an unsegregated and non-segmented utilisation of now often abandoned city-centre space in “open” forms favouring urban prairie, or more formalised urban parklands, interspersed with so-called “agritecture” in redundant high-rise buildings, shopping malls and parking lots. It favours sustainable theme-park models of family entertainment “experiences” all supported by sustainable hospitality, integrated mixed land uses and sustainable transportation. Consideration is given to likely financial resource issues but the dearth of current commercial investment opportunities from the old carbonised urban model, alongside public policy and consumer support for urban greening, are concluded to form a propitious post-coronavirus context for furthering the vision.