Epilogue: Urban Mobility and Social Equity in Latin American Cities: Evidence, Concepts and Methods for more Inclusive Cities Available to Purchase

As I write, the world is struggling with the novel Covid-19 respiratory virus pandemic, the most difficult challenge faced by humanity in generations. As infected individuals unwittingly continued to travel in a world more interconnected than ever before, the virus rapidly spread from China to parts of Asia, Europe, North and South America, and is making its way to the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. The measures taken around the world to contain it¹ have placed a huge fiscal and monetary burden on their governments – and on future generations. This initially involved a range of measures to contain the spread of the deadly virus by tracing and isolating infected cases, and subsequently deal with the high levels of morbidity and mortality that risk overwhelming even the most advanced health systems. More importantly, it has also involved temporarily stopping most forms of face-to-face interactions other than with household members through variations on ‘lockdown’ measures, thus effectively bringing entire national and city economies to a screeching halt for a few weeks. In cities for which there is reliable data, by early May 2020, this had resulted in mobility being reduced to less than 10% of their usual patterns, as reported by Google² and Citymapper.³