New local design in the new normal: Sustainable city for outbreak risk

There is an urgent need to transform the conventional city into a flexible and sustainable city that can respond to the risks of outbreaks in a broad sense, including global infectious disease pandemics and large-scale disasters. However, today's cities have many trade-off (compatibility) problems related to peacetime-emergency, global-local, and so on, in addition to inertia to change. In this paper, we presented the idea of a new local design in which people's well-being is maintained and improved even in the new normal, based on the idea of “three compatibility problems.” As a concrete measure, we developed the concept of milieu that emphasizes local “place” and “innovation,” and expresses its socio-economic function after including the void spaces of today's cities. At the same time, we proposed an autonomous and self-sustaining segmented city that can respond to outbreaks by increasing the self-efficacy of citizens. Furthermore, based on an analysis of the implementation cases of integrated transportation machizukuri with railway development in Japan, we reported that the emergence of new local design has already been seen in industry-government-private partnership efforts. •New local design connecting three elements of “civitas,” “urbs,” and “cyber” to maintain and improve people's well-being.•Proposed an autonomous and self-sustaining segmented city that can react to outbreaks by increasing citizens' self-efficacy.•Culture, art, and exchange opportunity are regarded as new NEXUS to enhance the self-efficacy and well-being.•Introduced an advanced new local design to utilize the urban void as a walkable street where people access the new Nexus.•Case studies of integrated design of transport infrastructure and urban spaces for industry-government-citizens partnership.