Vilnius Shows How the Pandemic Is Already Remaking Cities
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “Uncharted,” a series about the world we’re leaving behind, and the one being remade by the pandemic.
Vilnius isn’t the same city it was before the coronavirus. The Lithuanian capital has transformed into an open-air café, where hundreds of restaurants and bars can set up shop in its plazas, squares, and streets and serve customers from a safe distance. It also briefly operated a drive-in movie theater at the city’s idle airport, where people could gather in their cars to watch films projected against a giant screen. And next month, it will ban most cars from its Old Town to allocate more space to pedestrians.
“We planned it for next year,” Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius told me of the plan. But with the country on lockdown and
