On July 2nd 2021, Apostolos Kyriazis represented ISOCARP’s Community of Practice on Urban Health (CoPUH) at the ISUH’s 17th International Conference on Urban Health (“Transforming our Collective Urban Future: Learning from COVID-19”) as a Panelist at “The Covid-19 lockdown papers: Insights, reflections and implications for urbanism and city planning”, moderated by Marcus Grant. Apostolos highlighted the sensitive issue of children as an often neglected part of the pandemic experience and underlined the fact that there is no generic doctrine and that every city should pursue solutions adjusted to its own social, cultural and climatic context.

This panel was an initiative of the “Cities and Health” Journal, for promoting its special, Covid-19 issue, in which members of the CoPUH (Apostolos Kyriazis, Gregor Mews, Elisabeth Belpaire, Jens Aerts and Shahzad Ahmed Malik) had contributed with a full paper, entitled: “Physical distancing, children and urban health: The COVID-19 crisis’ impact on children and how this could affect future urban planning and design policies”.

In addition to that, this paper is included by the “Cities and Health” Journal’s editorial team into a 51-think-piece collection called ‘The COVID-19 Lockdown Papers’. The collection will be published soon as a curated set and promoted through a special issue supplement of the journal called ‘Cities, health and COVID-19: Initial reflections and future challenges.