What the pandemic means for urban and rural areas_With/after covid and its social issues

Esther Keller studied German language and literature, history and philosophy at the University of Basel. She worked as a presenter, producer and editor for Telebasel before becoming a media spokesperson for Novartis, specialising in campus and crisis communication. Her second book, a biography of the art collector Ernst Beyeler, was published in 2014. In 2015, she founded her own communications company. In the field of culture, she was on the board of the Kunsthaus Baselland and the Voluntary Museum Association, and in the field of business and innovation promotion, she was on the board of the Startup Academy. She was also Co-President of the NLA volleyball club Sm'Aesch Pfeffingen. From 2019 to 2021, she was a member of the Grand Council for the Basel Green Liberals. She has been Head of the Basel-Stadt Building and Transport Department since 2021.

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Ursula Scheidegger, PhD, social scientist, studied political science, anthropology, development economics and international relations and worked in Southern Africa for over 25 years. She was involved in various research projects at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg with a focus on democratisation, women, women's rights, the problem of violence against and discrimination against women and she has conducted research on public space and urban development. She has also worked on various NGO projects. She is a co-initiator and board member of Economiefeministe, the platform for feminist economics.

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Christian Schmid is a geographer and urban researcher. He is titular professor of sociology at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. He is on the board of the Zurich Architecture Centre (ZAZ) and is a founding member of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). He works on theories of the city and space, on Zurich's urban development, and on the international comparative analysis of urbanisation processes. He is co-author of 'Die Schweiz: ein städtebauliches Portrait' (together with Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili and Pierre de Meuron). As part of the ETH Future Cities Laboratory Singapore, he is leading a comparative study of urbanisation processes in Tokyo, Hong Kong/Shenzhen, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles.