Final report of the ADAPT4 project now released

The final report from the ADAPT4 project (Adaptable Cities, Pandemic Mitigation and Crisis Preparedness) has just been released. Led by Prof. Lauren Andres at the Bartlett School of Planning, in collaboration with Université Paris-Est, ESPI-Paris, and Tokyo University, ADAPT4 tackled the urgent question of how cities can rapidly adapt to future pandemics.

Funded by the British Academy, the project examined how urban environments can proactively safeguard health, wellbeing, and local economies—while maintaining their vital role as hubs for human, economic, and informational exchange. The research, spanning G7 countries with a focus on North America, Europe, and Asia, spotlighted four major cities: New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo.

The report offers a comprehensive overview of ADAPT4’s international mapping and city-level analyses, culminating in ten co-designed recommendations to strengthen urban crisis preparedness.

These can be summarised as:

• Promote experimentation in urban adaptation—temporary changes can inspire long-term improvements.
• Use experimentation as inclusive engagement, particularly when traditional participation is disrupted.
• Ensure flexible, local funding to enable bottom-up adaptations.
• Adopt soft, crisis-specific regulations to accelerate timely interventions.
• Encourage flexible and hybrid governance, with both local autonomy and national coherence.
• Foster trust-based, participatory decision-making, including for underrepresented groups.
• Prioritize knowledge-sharing and document adaptive strategies.
• Empower community hubs as points for resilience and response.
• Integrate technology-enabled planning to support data-driven crisis management.
• View preparedness as ongoing, embedding resilience into daily planning and governance.

Prof. Andres said: “Urban resilience and everyday city-making must be proactive, inclusive, and experimental—not just reactive. The lessons and recommendations from ADAPT4 should guide our efforts to make cities more flexible and responsive to future crises, pandemic or otherwise. We urge continued collaboration to document and reflect on urban adaptability, and to expand knowledge-sharing. At the heart of this is trust, and a more devolved, place-based approach to urban governance—key to fostering innovation and experimentation in the face of unprecedented challenges.”