Throughout history cities have been subjected to challenges, disruptions and change. But cities are resilient or, in the preferred phrase of urban geographers, they’re ‘complex adaptive systems’, able to recover and evolve. And there are plenty of examples of this resilience and evolution.

Along with many cities in the US, New York suffered from the fallout of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, boomed in the postwar era, was on the brink of bankruptcy during the 1970s following a collapse in oil prices and the impacts on the wider economy, and bounced back to become the world's leading financial centre in the 1980s. Yet, as I discuss in Chapter 9, there are tipping points beyond which the ability of cities to adapt is lost. Like the examples of cities that have bounced back there are many places that have been abandoned or are now merely empty shells, hosts to those who have little choice but to remain because of personal circumstances. The point is that there is nothing inevitable about urban resilience. Past abilities to evolve are not necessarily any indication of future adaptation.

Along with periodic economic or environmental disruptions, the latest challenge to the city is a familiar one in some respects. From an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco in 1900 to the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong in 2003, cities have managed public health crises, often replanning and rebuilding as a result, as Paris did in the 19th century, in part to improve sanitation through new water and sewage provision and to provide open space or ‘lungs for the city’, as it was termed at the time. The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is on a different scale. Rather than leading to replanning and rebuilding our cities it has changed them in different ways, reinforcing and accelerating elements of our online world, helping many access vital goods and services whilst self-isolating as people sought to work and school their children from home. What we can say is that the pandemic has overlaid and been closely, even inseparably, connected with the digital. However our cities respond, it will be difficult to disentangle the impacts and the extent to which digital was the cause of or the cure for how cities move forward from this particular challenge.