Accentuated social inequality 
On 19 March, ducks waddled along deserted Paris streets, deer roamed the Morbihan beaches and dolphins were seen in the ports of Venice.  An astonishing calm reigned and people everywhere were able to hear bird song! According to data collected by Orange, 17% of Ile-de-France residents left the region on 15 and 16 March, with an additional 2 or 3% following not long after. For the 80% who stayed behind, the environment improved significantly. According to Airparif, a direct consequence of the restriction of movement was the best air quality that has ever been seen for the last 40 years.
Inside homes, however, families were not all enjoying the same quality of life. Whilst some families benefited from having a sound-proofed room each, terraces, gardens or balconies, others were living on top of each other, suffering with noisy neighbours and comparing themselves to prisoners who were now locked up “alone or in cells in pairs” as “10,000 prisoners were released in less than one month”, as reported by the newspaper Les Echos on 16 April. A article appearing in the newspaper Parisien with the headline “Five people and a newborn baby locked down together in 11 square metres” at the end of March touched readers and caused an outpouring of solidarity. Some Parisians living in two or three room flats and who had left Paris offered their apartments to the family – and other families who were in similar situations – for the duration of the lockdown. 
We are also learning about the heavy price paid by our senior citizens during this Covid-19 epidemic and the extreme sense of loneliness that they face inside care homes. According to figures published on 26 April by the French public health authorities, 8,654 senior citizens have died in care homes. Calls by women and children, victims of domestic violence, doubled at the start of May. And the vulnerable were left more isolated than ever.

Homeschooling and remote working became essential in March with 8 million people across France working remotely at the start of May, according to the authorities. Whilst homeschooling appeals to only a small percentage of teachers and parents, working from home is seriously attractive to those who are able to so. A study carried out during lockdown by Malakoff Humanis, a group specialising in health and life insurance, found that 73% of those working remotely would like to continue to do so. 32% of these workers would to do so on a regular basis and 41% on an occasional basis. 
The rise in medical teleconsultations, which increased 15-fold between 1 and 28 March, is also notable. We are witnessing an e-commerce boom. According to Nielsen, 2.4 million households across France made the move to online shopping during lockdown. Orders placed with Amaps (associations supporting local French agriculture) or directly with producers have doubled since April, underlining the interest from French consumers in cutting out the middleman.  

It is still too early to say whether these new practices are here to stay. Remote working was the subject of a new study, performed by OpinionWay two days after lockdown was eased, showing that only 40% of French workers wanted to adopt remote working whilst 9% said that they wanted to work remotely full time. Despite some reservations (such as encroaching on private life, missing working with others, an over sedentary lifestyle and the related expenses incurred by employees), it appears that remote working has a bright future once the epidemic is over.

“Local communities kept the country afloat”, affirms André Laignel, Vice-President of the Association of French Mayors. They are playing a major role in managing the Covid-19 public health crisis, which has now mutated into an economic and social crisis. 
Implementing national measures, such as an unprecedented lockdown lasting for two months, also means answers key questions, such as how do we provide food aid for some families? How can we rehouse people who are living in close quarters in substandard housing? How can we care for the homeless during this period? And since 11 May, when lockdown restrictions were eased, they also had to address how to get children back to school and how to help shopkeepers and tradesmen who were acutely affected by the crisis. “Local needs are best understood at the local level”, indicated Michel Fournier, Mayor of Voivres (in the Vosges region) and first Vice-President of the Association of French Rural Mayors.

In addition to ensuring the continuity of essential public services, such as the Civil Registry (recording births and deaths), maintaining water supplies, collecting rubbish and ensuring a local police service, on 21 March municipalities who were able were asked by the French government to help with “4 key missions”, “for which volunteers are needed now more than ever: food and emergency aid, emergency childcare for children of key workers or child welfare services, contacting those who are vulnerable and isolated, and providing local neighbourly support”.

Many weaknesses 

With four billion people locked down around the world in April, this crisis was testament to the resourcefulness of our towns but also highlighted their weaknesses. The Covid-19 map of France, for example, highlights the “strong correlation between population density and the epidemic”, said economist Laurent Davezies in an interview published in Le Un on 13 May 2020. “Paul Krugman, recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, highlights the benefit of urban concentration in his work. According to Krugman, density is the philosopher’s stone of growth and innovation. However it is also the philosopher’s stone for Covid-19, which thrives on crowds (...). The virus is like Robin Hood, attacking towns and sparing rural locations”.

Moving towards a post-Covid world 
For many elected officials, urbanists and architects, Covid-19 is seen as a great opportunity for inventing a more environmentally- and human-focussed city model. The hour of exercise allowed per day during lockdown enabled city dwellers to see just how the car – which was banned from roads unless the driver held an exemption – had redrawn our urban environment. And that travelling on foot or by bicycle enabled them to move around relatively quickly and a reasonable distance. 
Tactical urbanism has been developing since the end of March in Bogota, New York, Montreal and Paris, where an addition 50 km of temporary cycle lanes have been created. Pedestrianised areas and terraces are encroaching on roads. Célia Blauel has said that she was inspired by Nicolas Soutier’s work entitled Reconquérir les rues, exemples à travers le monde et pistes d’action (2012). “He invites us not to think about streets and roads but as areas running alongside living spaces, and he encourages us to break free from town planning principles in order to make life spill out into the street, by creating green spaces next to houses”. The drop in traffic of nearly 50% in large urban areas at the end of May, according to data collected by TomTom, supports this vision. 

CÉLIA BLAUEL, HOW WAS THE CRISIS MANAGED ON A DAILY BASIS IN PARIS ?
C.B. - The Mayor understood what was happening very quickly and was able to start putting things in place two to three weeks ahead of lockdown. An operational crisis unit comprising fifteen people (the Mayor, Deputy Mayors and representatives from departments including Health, Safety and Cleaning) met every day at the Town Hall and then by video-conference as of 17 March. For three weeks [at the time of writing, on 23 May], we have been meeting every other day and the unit has grown by twenty-four people, to include the Mayors from the arrondissements (Paris districts). 
The objective was not only to manage the current crisis but also to anticipate what would happen if a series of crises occurred (a problem with the electricity, hauliers exercising their right to withdraw, etc.). 

The model that we have adopted is relevant, and we can see that today. It is based around four main pillars: crisis management (heatwave, epidemic, etc.) with a particular focus on the vulnerable, urban transformation (more green spaces, more water, less concrete), rejuvenation and focussing less on the car (by securing water, energy and food supplies), and lastly by getting Parisians involved in the city and making them stakeholders in our resilience.

But there is a world of difference between making a dream a reality. In any event, we are going to have to wait and see what happens in the next few months, or years, as these types of family trajectories are not built on a whim, even if the French are tending to choose smaller towns or less densely populated areas. 
But we should remember that it is suburban locations that have seen the biggest population growth rates in the last 50 years. It’s not always easy to leave behind your lifestyle and place of work, your social support networks and ties, especially in a country that is not famed for promoting mobility.

At the same time, key workers – in health, commerce and social spheres – have become “heroes” by ensuring the continuity of urban and essential social services. People also got involved to help each other, support each other and take care of each other, generate restricted urbanity and re-territorialize themselves – often at local levels, such as at the building or district level in terms of solidarity and at the regional level for short food supply chains. This is what a smart city means to me. It’s less about markets and technical expertise, and more about cohabitation, creativity and humanity.

These communities and chains, either constructed or developed in response to the emergency generated by the crisis, are fully fledged territorialisation processes that are extremely interesting in terms of addressing the crisis, obviously, but also for building the future, if we can intensify the various dynamics. It’s this mobilisation that could play a role in the post-Covid world, and which is much more promising than another more worrying trend that also emerged during the crisis and which was all about inward-looking attitudes, putting up borders, video surveillance, control, etc. In my opinion, real regional intelligence is about local dynamics, not the influence of tech superpowers. After all, this is the essence of what “regional” means.