Victor Pineda, Human Rights Expert and Urban Development Scholar. Luis Artieda, Research and Development Coordinator

If cities are systems that continue to leave people out, we have to reshape these systems. The current Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic crisis presents a unique opportunity to come together as a community to make a substantial impact in this global transformation.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global public health emergency with an unknown trajectory and unprecedented economic, political, and cultural costs on the health and well-being of our communities. Global fiscal support stands at US$9 Trillion. The pandemic has forced institutions and those that govern them to reevaluate and reconsider priorities, on individual, familial, and collective levels, exposing vast inequities and vulnerabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic poses immediate, dangerous, and disproportionate risks for persons with disabilities and older persons. These populations often experience barriers to full and active participation in society and poorer health outcomes, especially when disabilities interact with other characteristics, including gender, age, ethnicity, income, immigration status, and residence, particularly individuals in care/group homes.

Today, COVID-19 uniquely threatens persons with disabilities and older persons, who together account to close to 25% of the world’s population. 80% of these people live in low and middle-income countries. Persons with disabilities and older persons, depending on underlying health conditions, are at higher risk of contracting COVID-19 (WHO, 2020). Some of the challenges include:

1. COVID-19 exacerbates existing health conditions, particularly related to respiratory function, immune system function, heart disease or diabetes;
2. Barriers to accessing the health and rehabilitation care services that persons with disabilities and older persons rely on;
3. Difficulty in enacting social distancing and social isolation when living in residential institutions, refugee camps, or informal settlements requiring additional support from carers for essential needs;
4. Barriers to implementing necessary hygiene measures, such as difficulties with hand-washing (due to lack accessibility, or limited mobility, leading to difficulty rubbing their hands together); and
5. Barriers to accessing public health information (for example, the need to touch things to obtain information) and difficulty communicating for physical support.

Persons with disabilities have the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health without discrimination and an inherent right to life on an equal basis.

How to assess and create inclusion and accessibility

Cities should be able to unlock human potential, and create economic opportunities for everyone. An equitable approach to economic opportunity elevates our production possibility frontier. That is how we have to think about cities: as a hub, generating products, services, and culture; and as a system that perpetuates values in the built environment. Society's beliefs shape everything a city provides and, in turn, form the ideas, opinions, and expectations of society.

So, if we have systems that continue to leave people out, we need a big transformation. Unless we come together with a transformative goal, cities will replicate the same kind of exclusionary barriers. The following is a rapid assessment framework that can help everybody engage and make a city more inclusive and accessible, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic recovery:

Understanding the laws: does our city have legislative requirements ensuring accessibility? Are these requirements understood by all citizens?

1. Leadership: are our mayor, deputy mayor, and other leaders talking about this issue? And are they putting budgets towards identifying barriers and removing them?
2. Institutional capacity and coordination: You cannot solve inclusion with just a Ministry of Social Affairs or a division for social welfare. Does our city have a cross-agency approach that coordinates solutions to issues where persons with disabilities and older persons are ignored and fall through the cracks? That means human resources and institutional capacity.
3. Society's Attitudes: are there any outdated attitudes that prevent persons with disabilities from living up to their potential?
4. Participation: Are persons with disabilities participating in the resilience strategies, pandemic recovery strategies, smart city strategies, and in the master planning of their cities? Are we able to ensure that this participation includes persons with developmental disabilities, older persons, and psycho-social disabilities? It is not only about looking at ramps, but looking at the broad spectrum of human conditions.

Those are some key questions that will ensure a city becomes more accessible and inclusive. The future is a future of inclusion. We know the technical standards, we know the solutions. We need political will.

As a start, I invite everybody to join the Cities For All Global Campaign and Compact (www.cities4all.org). This multi-stakeholder platform includes UN-Habitat, United Cities Local Governments (UCLG), The UN Special Envoy on Disability and Accessibility, civil society organizations, individuals, and city governments to ensure cities #buildbackbetter. Currently, these cities are signatories of the campaign: Berlin, Chicago, New York, Amman, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Curitiba, Puebla, Helsinki, Abu Dhabi, and Barcelona. Together, we look to scale up our Covid-19 Pilot Survey, and Covid-19 Manifesto of Declared Actions for Empowering Local Governments in Inclusive Pandemic Response, to inform good practices on inclusive and accessible urban development.

This post-COVID-19 era presents a unique opportunity to use principles from the Cities4All Global Campaign, also found in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, New Urban Agenda, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We hope to make a substantial impact not only in reshaping our values but in reshaping our cities, so that they become places where we want to live, and where human dignity is protected, unleashing all human potential.

This opinion paper is part of the City of the Future event 1, exploring focus area 6: Mental Health and Identity.

Problem statement: How might we maintain and develop a focus on community cohesion, mental health and identity?