Reinventing community in COVID-19: a case in Canberra, Australia
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REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Reinventing community in COVID‑19: a case in Canberra, Australia Richard Hu1 Received: 17 May 2020 / Accepted: 11 June 2020 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract In this essay, I share my experiences and reflections of fighting COVID-19 from the perspective of a resident and a planner living and working in Canberra, Australia. I focus on three themes of building community compassion and collaboration and regard them as potential opportunities deriving from this crisis. First, COVID-19 presents a compulsory situation for establishing a virtual community and practising smart work. Second, COVID-19 helps rediscover a local community and nurture a special community spirit under the social distancing circumstance. Third, COVID-19 creates more opportunities of engaging and understanding nature, interestingly, in a context of staying home. These three themes are in large part rooted in the local communities of a city that is known for low density and being a ‘bush capital’ and possibly suggest some rethinking about the city’s planning legacy. Keywords COVID-19 · Virtual community · Local community · Natural community · Smart work · Canberra
1 Seeking local opportunities in a global crisis COVID-19 has paused the world. It is an unusual situation—an unwanted one although—under which we have to adapt, reflect, and envision. In the long process of human evolution, we have inherited and developed the wisdom of surviving a crisis dialectically: a crisis is often the prelude to opportunities. COVID-19 is a global disruption; but local impacts and responses vary. Here, I share my experiences and reflections of fighting the coronavirus as a resident and a planner living and working in Canberra, Australia’s capital city. I focus on building compassion and collaboration along three community-centric themes: a virtual community, a local community, and a natural community. These three themes are suggestive of some potential opportunities deriving from this crisis. They also inform some rethinking of the planning legacy of Canberra as a planned city. A brief introduction to Canberra’s economic, social, and environmental backgrounds assists with an understanding of my experiences and reflections. Within the national urban system, Canberra’s ‘industry’ is government and education. * Richard Hu [email protected] 1
The city’s economic base and identity is being diversified from a government city to a knowledge city that produces knowledge, information, innovation, and decision (Hu 2015). Canberra has a population of more than 400,000 on a vast land area of 814.2 km2 mostly of natural environment. The city’s built environment is characterised by low density, sprawl, and a predominant transport mode of private cars. These features of the natural and built environments win the city a nickname of ‘bush capital’, as typified in suburb Coombs where I live (Fig. 1). These features have influenced the way COVID-19 has been tackled in the local communities of the city. Canberra recorded its first CO
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